Clustering (Classification)

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Example:

Consider a group of people who share similar demographic information and who buy similar products from the Adventure Works company. This group of people represents a cluster of data. Several such clusters may exist in a database. By observing the columns that make up a cluster, you can more clearly see how records in a dataset are related to one another.

identifies relationships in a dataset and generates a series of clusters based on those relationships. A scatter plot is a useful way to visually represent how the algorithm groups data, as shown in the following diagram. The scatter plot represents all the cases in the dataset, and each case is a point on the graph. The clusters group points on the graph and illustrate the relationships that the algorithm identifies.

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After first defining the clusters, the algorithm calculates how well the clusters represent groupings of the points, and then tries to redefine the groupings to create clusters that better represent the data. The algorithm iterates through this process until it cannot improve the results more by redefining the clusters.

You can customize the way the algorithm works by selecting a specifying a clustering technique, limiting the maximum number of clusters, or changing the amount of support required to create a cluster. For more information, see

Microsoft Clustering Algorithm Technical Reference⁠

. this algorithm includes two popular clustering methods: K-means clustering and the Expectation Maximization method.

The requirements for a clustering model are as follows:

A single key column Each model must contain one numeric or text column that uniquely identifies each record. Compound keys are not allowed.

Input columns Each model must contain at least one input column that contains the values that are used to build the clusters. You can have as many input columns as you want, but depending on the number of values in each column, the addition of extra columns can increase the time it takes to train the model.

Optional predictable column The algorithm does not need a predictable column to build the model, but you can add a predictable column of almost any data type. The values of the predictable column can be treated as input to the clustering model, or you can specify that it be used for prediction only. For example, if you want to predict customer income by clustering on demographics such as region or age, you would specify income as PredictOnly and add all the other columns, such as region or age, as inputs.

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