What is cluster analysis in data science?
Cluster analysis is a statistical method used to group similar objects into respective categories. It is also known as taxonomy analysis, segmentation analysis, and clustering. It is based on the method of grouping or categorizing data points in a certain dataset. It classifies data into distinct groups called clusters based on shared characteristics.
Why is cluster analysis used?
In order to maximize the dissimilarity between different clusters and the similarity of the observations inside a specific cluster, cluster analysis is used.
Types of cluster analysis:
- k-means clustering: In data mining and statistics, it is a technique for cluster analysis. The goal is to divide a set of observations into a certain number of clusters (k), which divides the data into Voronoi cells.
- Hierarchical cluster analysis: An algorithm hierarchical cluster analysis or hierarchical clustering divides objects into clusters based on their similarities. The result is a collection of clusters, each of which differs from the others while having things that are generally similar to one another.
Is cluster analysis supervised or
unsupervised?
Cluster analysis is an unsupervised method that is used when there is no known association between the observations and the outcome (target) variable, which is the case with unlabeled data.
Types of data in cluster analysis:
- Binary variables
- Interval-scaled variables
- Nominal or categorical variables
- Ordinal variables
- Variables of mixed type
Applications of cluster analysis:
Numerous fields, including biology, medicine, market research, and education, can benefit from cluster analysis.
- Image segmentation
- Market segmentation
- Object recognition
- Computing distances
Benefits of cluster analysis:
- It is a straightforward process.
- Its approach is simple.
- It is incredibly efficient.
- It is a less complex method.
- We can simply group the data using data visualization.
- It provides automatic recovery from failure.
Disadvantages of cluster analysis:
- It needs several clusters in advance.
- It has problems with categorical variables.
- It is unable to restore a corrupted database.
Data Science with InfosecTrain
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