What Is Cluster Analysis?

Cluster Analysis
• What is Cluster Analysis?

• Types of Data in Cluster Analysis
• A Categorization of Major Clustering Methods
• Partitioning Methods
• Hierarchical Methods
• Density-Based Methods
• Grid-Based Methods
• Model-Based Clustering Methods
• Outlier Analysis
• Summary
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
• Cluster analysis
– Grouping a set of data objects into clusters
• Clustering is unsupervised classification: no
predefined classes
• Typical applications
– As a stand-alone tool to get insight into data
distribution
– As a preprocessing step for other algorithms
General Applications of Clustering
• Pattern Recognition
• Spatial Data Analysis
– create thematic maps in GIS by clustering feature
spaces
– detect spatial clusters and explain them in spatial data
mining
• Image Processing
• Economic Science (especially market research)
• WWW
– Document classification
– Cluster Weblog data to discover groups of similar
access patterns
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
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.
Classification is ‘more’ objective
• Can compare various algorithms
o x
x x
x x
o x
x x x o
o x
x o o o
oo
o o
o o o x o
x
Clustering is very subjective
• Cluster the following animals:
– Sheep, lizard, cat, dog, sparrow, blue shark, viper, seagull, gold
fish, frog, red-mullet
1. By the way they bear their progeny

2. By the existence of lungs
3. By the environment that they live in

4. By the way the bear their progeny and the existence of their lungs
Which way is correct? Depends

Requirements of Clustering in Data
Mining
• Scalability
• Ability to deal with different types of attributes
• Discovery of clusters with arbitrary shape
• Minimal requirements for domain knowledge to determine input
parameters
• Able to deal with noise and outliers
• Insensitive to order of input records
• High dimensionality
• Incorporation of user-specified constraints
• Interpretability and usability
Cluster Analysis
• Summary
Distance measure
• Dissimilarity/Similarity metric: Similarity is expressed in terms of a distance function, which is typically
metric: d(i, j)
• Similarity measure: Small means close
– Ex: Sequence similarity
TATATAAGTTCCA TATATAAGGCTAAT
TATATAAGT -TCCA
Distance = cost of insertion + 2*cost of changing C to A + cost of changing A to T

• TATATAAGGCTAAT
Dissimilarity measure: small means close
Data Structures
• Asymmetrical distance  x11 ... x1f ... x1p 
 
 ... ... ... ... ... 
x ... xif ... xip 
 i1 
 ... ... ... ... ... 
x ... xnf ... xnp 
 n1 
• Symmetrical distance
 0 
 d(2,1) 0 
 
 d(3,1) d ( 3,2) 0 
 
 : : : 
d ( n,1) d ( n,2) ... ... 0
Measure the Quality of Clustering
• 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 and ratio 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.
Type of data in clustering analysis
• Interval-scaled variables:
• Binary variables:
• Nominal, ordinal, and ratio variables:
• Variables of mixed types:
Interval-valued variables
• Standardize data
– Calculate the mean absolute deviation:
s f  1n (| x1 f  m f |  | x2 f  m f | ... | xnf  m f |)
where m f  1n (x1 f  x2 f  ...  xnf )

.
– Calculate the standardized measurement (z-score)

xif  m f
zif  sf
• Using mean absolute deviation is more robust than using
standard deviation
Similarity and Dissimilarity Between
Objects
• Distances are normally used to measure the similarity or
dissimilarity between two data objects
• Some popular ones include: Minkowski distance:
d (i, j)  q (| x  x |q  | x  x |q ... | x  x | q )
i1 j1 i2 j2 ip jp
where i = (xi1, xi2, …, xip) and j = (xj1, xj2, …, xjp) are two p-
dimensional data objects, and q is a positive integer
• If q = 1, d is Manhattan distance
d (i, j) | x  x |  | x  x | ... | x  x |
i1 j1 i2 j 2 ip j p
Similarity and Dissimilarity Between
Objects (Cont.)
• If q = 2, d is Euclidean distance:
d (i, j)  (| x  x | 2  | x  x |2 ... | x  x |2 )
i1 j1 i2 j2 ip jp
– Properties
• d(i,j)  0
• d(i,i) = 0
• d(i,j) = d(j,i)
• d(i,j)  d(i,k) + d(k,j)
• Also, one can use weighted distance, parametric
Pearson product moment correlation, or other disimilarity
measures
Binary Variables
• A contingency table for binary data
Object j
1 0 sum
1 a b a b
Object i 0 c d cd
sum a  c b  d p
• Simple matching coefficient (invariant, if the binary variable is
symmetric): d (i, j)  bc
a bc  d
• Jaccard coefficient (noninvariant if the binary variable is
asymmetric): bc
d (i, j) 
a bc
Dissimilarity between Binary
Variables
• Example
Name Gender Fever Cough Test-1 Test-2 Test-3 Test-4
Jack M Y N P N N N
Mary F Y N P N P N
Jim M Y P N N N N
– gender is a symmetric attribute

– the remaining attributes are asymmetric binary
– let the values Y and P be set to 1, and the value N be set to 0
01
d ( jack , mary )   0.33
2 01
11
d ( jack , jim )   0.67
111
1 2
d ( jim , mary )   0.75 18
11 2
Nominal Variables
• A generalization of the binary variable in that it can take
more than 2 states, e.g., red, yellow, blue, green
• Method 1: Simple matching
– m: # of matches, p: total # of variables
d (i, j)  p 
p
m
• Method 2: use a large number of binary variables

– creating a new binary variable for each of the M nominal states
Ordinal Variables
• An ordinal variable can be discrete or continuous
• Order is important, e.g., rank
• Can be treated like interval-scaled
– replace xif by their rank rif {1,..., M f }
– map the range of each variable onto [0, 1] by replacing i-th
object in the f-th variable by
rif 1
zif 
M f 1
– compute the dissimilarity using methods for interval-scaled
variables
Ratio-Scaled Variables
• Ratio-scaled variable: a positive measurement on a
nonlinear scale, approximately at exponential scale,
such as AeBt or Ae-Bt
• Methods:
– treat them like interval-scaled variables—not a good choice!
(why?—the scale can be distorted)
– apply logarithmic transformation
yif = log(xif)
– treat them as continuous ordinal data treat their rank as interval-
scaled
Variables of Mixed
Types
• A database may contain all the six types of variables
– symmetric binary, asymmetric binary, nominal, ordinal, interval
and ratio
• One may use a weighted formula to combine their
effects  pf  1 ij( f ) d ij( f )
d (i, j ) 
 pf  1 ij( f )
– f is binary or nominal:
dij(f) = 0 if xif = xjf , or dij(f) = 1 o.w.
– f is interval-based: use the normalized distance
– f is ordinal or ratio-scaled
• compute ranks rif and zif  rif  1
• and treat zif as interval-scaled
M f 1
Cluster Analysis
• Summary
Major Clustering Approaches
• Partitioning algorithms: Construct various partitions and then
evaluate them by some criterion
• Hierarchy algorithms: Create a hierarchical decomposition of the set
of data (or objects) using some criterion
• Density-based: based on connectivity and density functions
• Grid-based: based on a multiple-level granularity structure
• Model-based: A model is hypothesized for each of the clusters and
the idea is to find the best fit of that model to each other

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Cluster Analysis

• What is Cluster Analysis?

1. By the way they bear their progeny

3. By the environment that they live in

Which way is correct? Depends

Distance = cost of insertion + 2*cost of changing C to A + cost of changing A to T

where m f  1n (x1 f  x2 f  ...  xnf )

– Calculate the standardized measurement (z-score)

– gender is a symmetric attribute

• Method 2: use a large number of binary variables

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