Clustering Algorithms

Data mining tasks  Predictive vs descriptive tasks – Predictive tasks: predict the value of a particular attribute (the target variable) based on the values of other attributes – Descriptive tasks: derive patterns (correlations, trends, clusters, trajectories, and anomalies) that summarize the underlying relationships in data  Predictive modeling – The goal of predictive modeling is to learn a model that minimizes the error between the predicted and true values of the target variable – Classification: for discrete target variables – Regression: for continuous target variables  Cluster analysis – The goal is to find groups of similar observations/objects – Many clustering algorithms have been developed Applications of clustering in biology