Clustering

It frequently happens that the a given class is not homogeneous, but is composed of a number of distinct subclasses. In the example shown above, there are obviously three different kinds of letters in the "A" class, and the average or mean feature vector may not represent any one subclass, let alone all of them. In designing the classifier, it would make sense to have three categories A1, A2 and A3, and say that the input is an "A" if it matches either A1 or A2 or A3. In general, if we know that a class contains k subclasses, we could design a two-stage classifier, in which we first assign a feature vector x to a subclass, and then OR the results to identify the class.

The problem of finding subclasses in a set of examples from a given class is called unsupervised learning. The problem is easiest when the feature vectors for examples in a subclass are close together and form a cluster. We will consider four popular methods for finding clusters:
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