The Role of Visual Assessment of Clusters for Big Data Analysis: From Real-World Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is playing a vital role in shaping today?s technological world, including our daily lives. By 2025, the number of connected devices due to the IoT is estimated to surpass a whopping 75 billion. It is a challenging task to discover, integrate, and interpret processed big data from such ubiquitously available heterogeneous and actively natural resources and devices. Cluster analysis of IoT-generated big data is essential for the meaningful interpretation of such complex data. However, we often have very limited knowledge of the number of clusters actually present in the given data. The problem of finding whether clusters are present even before applying clustering algorithms is termed the assessment of clustering tendency. In this article, we present a set of useful visual assessment of cluster tendency (VAT) tools and techniques developed with major contributions from James C. Bezdek. The article further highlights how these techniques are advancing the IoT through large-scale IoT implementations.