Clustering Techniques: A Brief Survey of Different Clustering Algorithms

Partitioning a set of objects into homogeneous clusters is a fundamental operation in data mining. The operation is needed in a number of data mining tasks. Clustering or data grouping is the key technique of the data mining. It is an unsupervised learning task where one seeks to identify a finite set of categories termed clusters to describe the data . The grouping of data into clusters is based on the principle of maximizing the intra class similarity and minimizing the inter class similarity. The goal of clustering is to determine the intrinsic grouping in a set of unlabeled data. But how to decide what constitutes a good clustering? This paper deal with the study of various clustering algorithms of data mining and it focus on the clustering basics, requirement, classification, problem and application area of the clustering algorithms.