Practical Introduction to Clustering Data

Data clustering is an approach to seek for structure in sets of complex data, i.e., sets of “objects”. The main objective is to identify groups of objects which are similar to each other, e.g., for classification. Here, an introduction to clustering is given and three basic approaches are introduced: the k-means algorithm, neighbour-based clustering, and an agglomerative clustering method. For all cases, C source code examples are given, allowing for an easy implementation. This introduction originates (with a couple of modifications) from section 8.5.6 of the book: A.K. Hartmann, Big Practical Guide to Computer Simulations, World-Scientifc, Singapore (2015).