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Clustering or Cluster analysis is a data mining technique that is used to discover patterns in data by grouping similar objects together. It involves partitioning a set of data points into groups or clusters based on their similarities. One of the fundamental aspects of clustering is how to measure similarity between data points.
Data can be binary, ordinal, or continuous variables. It works by normalizing the differences between each pair of variables and then computing a weighted average of these differences. The distance was defined in 1971 by Gower [1] and it takes values between 0 and 1 with smaller values indicating higher similarity.
For example, consider a supermarket with 1000 products and two customers. The basket of the first customer contains salt and pepper and the basket of the second contains salt and sugar. In this scenario, the similarity between the two baskets as measured by the Jaccard index would be 1/3, but the similarity becomes 0.998 using the SMC.
Similarity learning is closely related to distance metric learning.Metric learning is the task of learning a distance function over objects. A metric or distance function has to obey four axioms: non-negativity, identity of indiscernibles, symmetry and subadditivity (or the triangle inequality).
A plot showing silhouette scores from three types of animals from the Zoo dataset as rendered by Orange data mining suite. At the bottom of the plot, silhouette identifies dolphin and porpoise as outliers in the group of mammals. Assume the data have been clustered via any technique, such as k-medoids or k-means, into clusters.
Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a means of visualizing the level of similarity of individual cases of a data set. MDS is used to translate distances between each pair of n {\textstyle n} objects in a set into a configuration of n {\textstyle n} points mapped into an abstract Cartesian space .
Cosine similarity is a widely used measure to compare the similarity between two pieces of text. It calculates the cosine of the angle between two document vectors in a high-dimensional space. [14] Cosine similarity ranges between -1 and 1, where a value closer to 1 indicates higher similarity, and a value closer to -1 indicates lower similarity.
Educational data mining Cluster analysis is for example used to identify groups of schools or students with similar properties. Typologies From poll data, projects such as those undertaken by the Pew Research Center use cluster analysis to discern typologies of opinions, habits, and demographics that may be useful in politics and marketing.