Chapter 4. Clustering: grouping things together
This chapter covers:
- Understanding the need and value of clustering
- Discovering user groups in a typical website and finding groups of similar news stories, blog reports, or documents.
- Link-based clustering algorithms and the blazing fast k-means
Our ability as humans to accumulate and retain information relies greatly on our ability to structure the abundance of information that we receive through means, such as sensory perception, reason, language, and emotion. The profusion of available information would be overwhelming without some reference structures. Mental constructs that put order to all the data that we receive help us retain the essence of the data and understand the world around us.
Typically, we organize our perceptions into groups or categories. Intelligent applications follow the same principles and achieve the same results by means of two broad categories of algorithms—clustering and classification. This chapter is devoted to clustering algorithms; the next chapter is devoted to classification.