Clustering algorithms

Clustering is an important and popular machine learning tool used to find clusters of items in a data set that are similar to one another. The goal of clustering is to create clusters with a high number of objects that are similar. Similar to classification, clustering segments the data. However, in clustering, the categorical groups are not defined.

Clustering data into related groupings has many useful applications. If you already know how many clusters your data contains, the K-means algorithm may be sufficient to train your model and use that model to predict cluster membership for new data points.

However, in the more common case, you do not know before analyzing the data how many clusters it contains. In these cases, the Bisecting k-means algorithm is much more effective at finding the correct clusters in your data.

Both k-means and bisecting k-means predict the clusters for a given data set. A model trained using either algorithm can then be used to predict the cluster to which new data points are assigned.

Clustering can be used to find anomalies in data and find natural groups of data. For example, you can use clustering to analyze a geographical region and determine which areas of that region are most likely to be hit by an earthquake. For a complete example, see Earthquake Cluster Analysis Using the KMeans Approach.

In Vertica, clustering is computed based on Euclidean distance. Through this computation, data points are assigned to the cluster with the nearest center.