Clustering Techniques

Clustering is a process of grouping a set of data points in such a way that data points in the same group (called cluster) are more similar to each other than to data points lying in other groups (clusters). Clustering is a main task of exploratory data mining, and it has been widely used in many areas such as pattern recognition, image analysis, machine learning, bioinformatics, information retrieval, and so on. Clusters are always identified by similarity measures. These similarity measures include intensity, distance, and connectivity. Based on the applications of the data, different similarity measures may be chosen. The purpose of this chapter is to produce an overview of much (certainly not all) of clustering algorithms. The chapter covers valuable surveys, the types of clusters, and methods used for constructing the clusters.