What is Clustering ? | Intellipaat

The process of clustering involves grouping the population or data points into a number of groups so that the data points within each group are more similar to one another than the data points within other groups. Simply put, the goal is to sort into clusters any groups of people who share similar characteristics.

Let's use an example to better understand this. Assume you are the owner of a rental business and want to know what your customers prefer so you can grow your company. Is it possible for you to analyze each customer's specifics and come up with a special business plan for each one of them? Absolutely not. However, you can use a different approach for each of the ten groups of customers by grouping all of your customers into, say, ten groups based on their purchasing patterns. We refer to this as clustering.

Clustering Types

Clustering can be broadly divided into two subgroups:

Hard Clustering: Each data point in hard clustering either fully or partially belongs to a cluster. For instance, in the example above, each customer is assigned to one of the 10 groups.

Soft Clustering: In soft clustering, a probability or likelihood of each data point being in each cluster is assigned rather than placing each data point into a separate cluster. For instance, based on the aforementioned scenario, each customer is given a probability of being in one of the retail store's ten clusters.