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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 494–499Cite as

Clustering Overview and Applications

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Synonyms

Unsupervised learning

Definition

Clustering is the assignment of objects to groups of similar objects (clusters). The objects are typically described as vectors of features (also called attributes). Attributes can be numerical (scalar) or categorical. The assignment can be hard, where each object belongs to one cluster, or fuzzy, where an object can belong to several clusters with a probability. The clusters can be overlapping, though typically they are disjoint. A distance measure is a function that quantifies the similarity of two objects.

Historical Background

Clustering is one of the most useful tasks in data analysis. The goal of clustering is to discover groups of similar objects and to identify interesting patterns in the data. Typically, the clustering problem is about partitioning a given data set into groups (clusters) such that the data points in a cluster are more similar to each other than points in different clusters [4, 8]. For example, consider a retail...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of California at Riverside, Bourns College of Engineering, Riverside, CA, USA

    Dimitrios Gunopulos

Authors
  1. Dimitrios Gunopulos
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dimitrios Gunopulos .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of California at Riverside, Bourns College of Engineering, Riverside, CA, USA

    Dimitrios Gunopulos

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Gunopulos, D. (2018). Clustering Overview and Applications. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_602

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