Introduction to Clustering and Unsupervised Learning PACKT Books

The act of clustering, or spotting patterns in data, is not much different from spotting patterns in groups of people. Before jumping into action, we'll begin by taking an in-depth look at exactly what clustering entails. Clustering is an unsupervised machine learning task that automatically divides the data into clusters, or groups of similar items. It does this without having been told how the groups should look ahead of time. As we may not even know what we're looking for, clustering is used for knowledge discovery rather than prediction. It provides an insight into the natural groupings found within data.