R: Unleash Machine Learning Techniques

Chapter 9. Finding Groups of Data – Clustering with k-means

Have you ever spent time watching a large crowd? If so, you are likely to have seen some recurring personalities. Perhaps a certain type of person, identified by a freshly pressed suit and a briefcase, comes to typify the "fat cat" business executive. A twenty-something wearing skinny jeans, a flannel shirt, and sunglasses might be dubbed a "hipster," while a woman unloading children from a minivan may be labeled a "soccer mom."

Of course, these types of stereotypes are dangerous to apply to individuals, as no two people are exactly alike. Yet understood as a way to describe a collective, the labels capture some underlying aspect of similarity among the individuals within the group.

As ...