A Survey of Partitional and Hierarchical Clustering Algorithms

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Abstract
The two most widely studied clustering algorithms are partitional and hierarchical clustering. These algorithms have been heavily used in a wide range of applications primarily due to their simplicity and ease of implementation relative to other clustering algorithms. Partitional clustering algorithms aim to discover the groupings present in the data by optimizing a specific objective function and iteratively improving the quality of the partitions. These algorithms generally require certain user parameters to choose the prototype points that represent each cluster. For this reason they are also called prototype-based clustering algorithms.