Summary

In this chapter, you learned about three different clustering algorithms that can help us with the discovery of hidden structures or information in data. We started this chapter with a prototype-based approach, k-means, which clusters samples into spherical shapes based on a specified number of cluster centroids. Since clustering is an unsupervised method, we do not enjoy the luxury of ground truth labels to evaluate the performance of a model. Thus, we used intrinsic performance metrics such as the elbow method or silhouette analysis as an attempt to quantify the quality of clustering.

We then looked at a different approach to clustering: agglomerative hierarchical clustering. Hierarchical clustering does not require specifying the number of clusters up front, and the result can be visualized in a dendrogram representation, which can help with the interpretation of the results. The last clustering algorithm that we saw in this chapter was DBSCAN, an algorithm that groups points...