Clustering

This book reviews recently developed data clustering techniques and algorithms and discusses the development of data clustering, including measures of similarity or dissimilarity for data clustering, data clustering algorithms, assessment of clustering algorithms, and data clustering methods recently developed for insurance, psychology, pattern recognition, and survey data.

This book summarizes the state-of-the-art in partitional clustering. Clustering, the unsupervised classification of patterns into groups, is one of the most important tasks in exploratory data analysis. Primary goals of clustering include gaining insight into, classifying, and compressing data. Clustering has a long and rich history that spans a variety of scientific disciplines including anthropology, biology, medicine, psychology, statistics, mathematics, engineering, and computer science. As a result, numerous clustering algorithms have been proposed since the early 1950s. Among these algorithms, partitional (nonhierarchical) ones have found many applications, especially in engineering and computer science. This book provides coverage of consensus clustering, constrained clustering, large scale and/or high dimensional clustering, cluster validity, cluster visualization, and applications of clustering.

The book aims to provide an outlook of recent contributions to the vast clustering literature that offers useful insights within the context of modern applications for professionals, academics, and students. The book spans the domains of clustering in image analysis, lexical analysis of texts, replacement of missing values in data, temporal clustering in smart cities, comparison of artificial neural network variations, graph theoretical approaches, spectral clustering, multiview clustering, and model-based clustering in an R package.

This book offers an original and broad exploration of the fundamental methods in Clustering and Combinatorial Data Analysis, presenting new formulations and ideas within this very active field.

This book discusses recent theoretical developments in agglomerative hierarchical clustering. The general understanding of agglomerative hierarchical clustering is that its theory was completed long ago and there is no room for further methodological studies, at least in its fundamental structure. This book has been planned counter to that view: it will show that there are possibilities for further theoretical studies and they will be not only for methodological interests but also for usefulness in real applications. When compared with traditional textbooks, the present book has several notable features. First, standard linkage methods and agglomerative procedure are described by a general algorithm in which dendrogram output is expressed by a recursive subprogram.

Nearly everyone knows K-means algorithm in the fields of data mining and business intelligence. But the ever-emerging data with extremely complicated characteristics bring new challenges to this "old" algorithm. This book addresses these challenges and makes novel contributions in establishing theoretical frameworks for K-means distances and K-means based consensus clustering, identifying the "dangerous" uniform effect and zero-value dilemma of K-means, adapting right measures for cluster validity, and integrating K-means with SVMs for rare class analysis. This book not only enriches the clustering and optimization theories, but also provides good guidance for the practical use of K-means, especially for important tasks such as network intrusion detection and credit fraud prediction. The thesis on which this book is based has won the "2010 National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Award", the highest honor for not more than 100 PhD theses per year in China.