11 Similarity & Difference Clustering business data requires some notion of natural association – records (data) in a given cluster are more similar to each other than to those in another cluster For DM software, this concept of association must be translated into some sort of numeric measure of the degree of similarity Most common translation is to translate data values (eg., gender, age, product, etc.) into numeric values so can be treated as points in space If two points are close in geometric sense then they represent similar data in the database
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