Description

The problem of clustering is perhaps one of the most widely studied in the data mining and machine learning communities. This problem has been studied by researchers from several disciplines over five decades. Applications of clustering include a wide variety of problem domains such as text, multimedia, social networks, and biological data. Furthermore, the problem may be encountered in a number of different scenarios such as streaming or uncertain data. Clustering is a rather diverse topic, and the underlying algorithms depend greatly on the data domain and problem scenario.
Therefore, this book will focus on three primary aspects of data clustering. The first set of chapters will focus on the core methods for data clustering. These include methods such as probabilistic clustering, density-based clustering, grid-based clustering, and spectral clustering. The second set of chapters will focus on different problem domains and scenarios such as multimedia data, text data, biological data, categorical data, network data, data streams and uncertain data. The third set of chapters will focus on different detailed insights from the clustering process, because of the subjectivity of the clustering process, and the many different ways in which the same data set can be clustered. How do we know that a particular clustering is good or that it solves the needs of the application? There are numerous ways in which these issues can be explored. The exploration could be through interactive visualization and human interaction, external knowledge-based supervision, explicitly examining the multiple solutions in order to evaluate different possibilities, combining the multiple solutions in order to create more robust ensembles, or trying to judge the quality of different solutions with the use of different validation criteria