Clustering

Clustering is the process of dividing up the data occurrences into groups or homogeneous subsets of the dataset, not a predetermined set of groups as in classification (described in the preceding section) but groups identified by the execution of the data science process based upon similarities that it found among the occurrences.

Objects in the same group (a group is also referred to as a cluster) are found to be more analogous (in some sense or another) to each other than to those objects found in other groups (or found in other clusters). The process of clustering is found to be very common in exploratory data mining and is also a common technique for statistical data analysis.