Difference between classification and clustering in data mining?

machine-learning classification cluster-analysis data-mining terminology
Kristaps picture Kristaps · Feb 21, 2011 · Viewed 227.3k times · Source

Can someone explain what the difference is between classification and clustering in data mining?

If you can, please give examples of both to understand the main idea.

Answer

Felix Kling picture Felix Kling · Feb 21, 2011

In general, in classification you have a set of predefined classes and want to know which class a new object belongs to.

Clustering tries to group a set of objects and find whether there is some relationship between the objects.

In the context of machine learning, classification is supervised learning and clustering is unsupervised learning.

Also have a look at Classification and Clustering at Wikipedia.

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