Clustering

Clustering

1. Divide data into groups that are meaningful, useful, or both

   • Meaningful: Natural structure of the data
     • Create classifications (clustering)
     • Assign data to clusters (classification)
   • Useful: Starting point for other purposes
     • Abstract from individual data objects
     • Characterization of clusters and objects w/in
     • Efficient finding of nearest neighbors
     • Summarization
     • Compression