A Short Review on Different Clustering Techniques and Their Applications

Abstract

In modern world, we have to deal with huge volumes of data which include image, video, text and web documents, DNA, microarray gene data, etc. Organizing such data into rational groups is a critical first step to draw inferences. Data clustering analysis has emerged as an effective technique to accurately accomplish the task of categorizing data into sensible groups. Clustering has a rich association with researches in various scientific domains. One of the most popular clustering algorithms, k-means algorithm was proposed as early as 1957. Since then, many clustering algorithms have been developed and used, to group data in various commercial and non-commercial sectors alike. In this paper, we have given concise description of the existing types of clustering approaches followed by a survey of the fields where clustering analytics has been effectively employed in pattern recognition and knowledge discovery.