An Overview of Clustering Methods Short title: Clustering Methods

Data clustering is the process of identifying natural groupings or clusters within multidimensional data based on some similarity measure. Clustering is a fundamental process in many different disciplines. Hence, researchers from different fields are actively working on the clustering problem. This paper provides an overview of the different representative clustering methods. In addition, several clustering validations indices are shown. Furthermore, approaches to automatically determine the number of clusters are presented. Finally, application of different heuristic approaches to the clustering problem is also investigated.