What is Cluster Analysis?

Cluster: a collection of data objects

Similar to one another within the same cluster

Dissimilar to the objects in other clusters Finding similarities between data according to the characteristics found in the data and grouping similar data objects into clusters

Cluster analysis

Unsupervised learning: no predefined classes Typical applications

As a stand-alone tool to get insight into data distribution As a preprocessing step for other algorithms
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Clustering: Rich Applications and Multidisciplinary Efforts

Pattern Recognition

Spatial Data Analysis

Create thematic maps in GIS by clustering feature spaces Detect spatial clusters or for other spatial mining tasks

Image Processing Economic Science (especially market research) WWW

Document classification Cluster Weblog data to discover groups of similar access patterns
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Examples of Clustering Applications

Marketing: Help marketers discover distinct groups in their customer bases, and then use this knowledge to develop targeted marketing programs Land use: Identification of areas of similar land use in an earth observation database Insurance: Identifying groups of motor insurance policy holders with a high average claim cost City-planning: Identifying groups of houses according to their house type, value, and geographical location Earth-quake studies: Observed earth quake epicenters should be clustered along continent faults

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

Quality: What Is Good Clustering?

A good clustering method will produce high quality

clusters with

high intra-class similarity low inter-class similarity

The quality of a clustering result depends on both the similarity measure used by the method and its implementation The quality of a clustering method is also measured by its ability to discover some or all of the hidden patterns

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

Measure the Quality of Clustering

Dissimilarity/Similarity metric: Similarity is expressed in terms of a distance function, typically metric: d(i, j) There is a separate quality function that measures the goodness of a cluster. The definitions of distance functions are usually very different for interval-scaled, boolean, categorical, ordinal ratio, and vector variables. Weights should be associated with different variables based on applications and data semantics. It is hard to define similar enough or good enough

the answer is typically highly subjective.

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Typical Alternatives to Calculate the Distance between Clusters

Single link: smallest distance between an element in one cluster

and an element in the other, i.e., dis(Ki, Kj) = min(tip, tjq)

Complete link: largest distance between an element in one cluster

and an element in the other, i.e., dis(Ki, Kj) = max(tip, tjq)

Average: avg distance between an element in one cluster and an

element in the other, i.e., dis(Ki, Kj) = avg(tip, tjq)

Centroid: distance between the centroids of two clusters, i.e.,

dis(Ki, Kj) = dis(Ci, Cj)

Medoid: distance between the medoids of two clusters, i.e., dis(Ki,

Kj) = dis(Mi, Mj)

Medoid: one chosen, centrally located object in the cluster

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Centroid, Radius and Diameter of a Cluster (for numerical data sets)

Centroid: the middle of a cluster

Cm

iN 1(t
N

ip

Radius: square root of average distance from any point of the cluster to its centroid

N (t cm ) 2 Rm i 1 ip N

Diameter: square root of average mean squared distance between all pairs of points in the cluster

N N (t t ) 2 Dm i 1 i 1 ip iq N ( N 1)
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Chapter 7. Cluster Analysis

1. What is Cluster Analysis? 2. Types of Data in Cluster Analysis 3. A Categorization of Major Clustering Methods 4. Partitioning Methods 5. Hierarchical Methods

6. Density-Based Methods
7. Grid-Based Methods 8. Model-Based Methods 9. Clustering High-Dimensional Data 10. Constraint-Based Clustering 11. Outlier Analysis 12. Summary
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Partitioning Algorithms: Basic Concept

Partitioning method: Construct a partition of a database D of n objects into a set of k clusters, s.t., min sum of squared distance

k m1 tmiKm

(Cm tmi )

Given a k, find a partition of k clusters that optimizes the chosen partitioning criterion

Global optimal: exhaustively enumerate all partitions Heuristic methods: k-means and k-medoids algorithms

k-means (MacQueen67): Each cluster is represented by the center

of the cluster

k-medoids or PAM (Partition around medoids) (Kaufman &

Rousseeuw87): Each cluster is represented by one of the objects in the cluster

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

The K-Means Clustering Method

Given k, the k-means algorithm is implemented in four steps:

Partition objects into k nonempty subsets Compute seed points as the centroids of the clusters of the current partition (the centroid is the center, i.e., mean point, of the cluster) Assign each object to the cluster with the nearest seed point Go back to Step 2, stop when no more new assignment
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The K-Means Clustering Method

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Example
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8
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4 3 2 1 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Assign each objects to most similar center

3 2 1 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Update the cluster means

4 3 2 1 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

reassign
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10 9 8 7 6

reassign

K=2 Arbitrarily choose K object as initial cluster center

7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Update the cluster means

5 4 3 2 1 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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Comments on the K-Means Method

Strength: Relatively efficient: O(tkn), where n is # objects, k is # clusters, and t is # iterations. Normally, k, t << n.

Comparing: PAM: O(k(n-k)2 ), CLARA: O(ks2 + k(n-k))

Comment: Often terminates at a local optimum. The global optimum may be found using techniques such as: deterministic annealing and

genetic algorithms

Weakness

Applicable only when mean is defined, then what about categorical data?

Need to specify k, the number of clusters, in advance

Unable to handle noisy data and outliers Not suitable to discover clusters with non-convex shapes
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Variations of the K-Means Method

A few variants of the k-means which differ in

Selection of the initial k means Dissimilarity calculations Strategies to calculate cluster means

Handling categorical data: k-modes (Huang98)

Replacing means of clusters with modes Using new dissimilarity measures to deal with categorical objects Using a frequency-based method to update modes of clusters A mixture of categorical and numerical data: k-prototype method
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What Is the Problem of the K-Means Method?

The k-means algorithm is sensitive to outliers !

Since an object with an extremely large value may substantially

distort the distribution of the data.

K-Medoids: Instead of taking the mean value of the object in a

cluster as a reference point, medoids can be used, which is the most

centrally located object in a cluster.
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The K-Medoids Clustering Method

Find representative objects, called medoids, in clusters

PAM (Partitioning Around Medoids, 1987)

starts from an initial set of medoids and iteratively replaces one of the medoids by one of the non-medoids if it improves the total distance of the resulting clustering

PAM works effectively for small data sets, but does not scale
well for large data sets

CLARA (Kaufmann & Rousseeuw, 1990) CLARANS (Ng & Han, 1994): Randomized sampling
Focusing + spatial data structure (Ester et al., 1995)
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A Typical K-Medoids Algorithm (PAM)

Total Cost = 20
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
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Arbitrary choose k object as initial medoids

7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Assign each remainin g object to nearest medoids

7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

K=2
Total Cost = 26

Randomly select a nonmedoid object,Oramdom

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Do loop Until no change

10 9

Swapping O and Oramdom If quality is improved.

8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Compute total cost of swapping

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