Big Data Analytics: A Tutorial of Some Clustering Techniques

Data Clustering or unsupervised classification is one of the main research areas in Data Mining. Partitioning Clustering involves the partitioning of n objects into k clusters. Many clustering algorithms use hard (crisp) partitioning techniques where each object is assigned to one cluster. The most widely used in hard partitioning algorithm is the K-means and its variations and extensions such as the K-Medoid. Other algorithms use overlapping techniques where an object may belong to one or more clusters. Partitioning algorithms that overlap include the commonly used Fuzzy K-means and its variations. Other more recent algorithms reviewed in this paper are the Overlapping K-Means (OKM), Weighted OKM (WOKM) the Overlapping Partitioning Cluster (OPC) and the Multi-Cluster Overlapping K-means Extension (MCOKE). This tutorial focuses on the above-mentioned partitioning algorithms. We hope this paper can be beneficial to students, educational institutions, and any other curious mind trying to learn and understand the k-means clustering algorithm.