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The Wonderful World of Clustering

``By utilizing our powerful cyclo-heuristic Bayes-o-matic clustering algorithms, you will expose the secrets of the universe by a single mouse-click. Uncover the origins of life, predict the stock market, amaze friends and family!!''

OK, it would be nice if clustering (unsupervised machine learning) algorithms actually could do all this, but, in reality, they can't. What they can do, is help focus your time and energy as a scientist. On the surface, clustering algorithms can give contradictory results, but remember, different algorithms are searching on different characteristics of your data. They will dutifully find what they are programmed to, but it is up to you and your human brain to interpret the results in way that is meaningful to what you are looking for.



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Lucas Scharenbroich 2003-08-27