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Cluster Analysis

Cluster analysis is a statistical technique for grouping similar objects or points into clusters, widely used in fields like machine learning and bioinformatics. It includes various types such as partitioning clustering (e.g., K-means), hierarchical clustering (agglomerative and divisive), density-based clustering (e.g., DBSCAN), grid-based clustering, model-based clustering (e.g., Gaussian Mixture Models), and subspace clustering. Each type has its unique approach and advantages for analyzing data.

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8 views4 pages

Cluster Analysis

Cluster analysis is a statistical technique for grouping similar objects or points into clusters, widely used in fields like machine learning and bioinformatics. It includes various types such as partitioning clustering (e.g., K-means), hierarchical clustering (agglomerative and divisive), density-based clustering (e.g., DBSCAN), grid-based clustering, model-based clustering (e.g., Gaussian Mixture Models), and subspace clustering. Each type has its unique approach and advantages for analyzing data.

Uploaded by

Sudhanshu Verma
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Cluster Analysis

Cluster analysis, also known as clustering, is a statistical technique


used in machine learning and data mining that involves the
grouping of objects or points in such a way that objects in the same
group, also known as a cluster, are more similar to each other than
to those in other groups.
It is a main task of exploratory data analysis and is used in various
fields, including machine learning, pattern recognition, image
analysis, information retrieval, and bioinformatics.
Types of Cluster Analysis
• Partitioning Clustering:
• This type of clustering divides data into a set of mutually exclusive clusters. The
most well-known method in this category is the K-means clustering algorithm,
where ‘K’ refers to the pre-specified number of clusters. These methods
typically start with a random partitioning of data and refine it through an
iterative process.
• Hierarchical Clustering:
• This type of clustering creates a tree of clusters. Hierarchical clustering, not
only clusters the data, but also builds a hierarchy of clusters, like a binary tree
structure. It comes in two flavors
• Agglomerative (Bottom-Up): Each data point starts in its own cluster and pairs of
clusters are merged as one moves up the hierarchy.
• Divisive (Top-Down): All data points start in one cluster, and splits are performed
recursively as one moves down the hierarchy.
Types of Cluster Analysis
• Density-Based Clustering
• These types of algorithms look for areas in the feature space where there are
high densities of observations. The most famous of these is DBSCAN (Density-
Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise). It works by defining a
neighborhood around a data point and if there are a minimum number of
points within this neighborhood then a cluster is started.
• Grid-Based Clustering
• These types of algorithms quantize the space into a finite number of cells
forming a grid structure and perform all clustering operations on this obtained
grid structure. The primary advantage of these algorithms is its fast processing
time, which is typically dependent on the number of cells in each dimension in
the quantized space.
Types of Cluster Analysis
• Model-Based Clustering
• These algorithms hypothesize a model for each cluster and find the best fit of
data to a given model. Examples of these are Gaussian Mixture Models and
Expectation-Maximization algorithms. The advantage here is the model
provides a probabilistic framework for estimating the characteristics of the
process generating the data.
• Subspace Clustering or Biclustering
• While in standard clustering, an object belongs to exactly one cluster, in
subspace clustering, an object can belong to more than one cluster and each
cluster is associated with a subset of the dimensions. This type of clustering is
particularly useful for high-dimensional data where each dimension represents
a feature of the data.

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