Machine Learning Hard Vs Soft Clustering
Understand Where Machine Learning Clustering Algorithms Fit
This article presents an overview of the two forms of clustering, known as hard and soft clustering. Although soft clustering is not highlighted in most of the machine learning articles but it is crucial to understand it as many problems can be solved by using the soft clustering algorithms.
We should not ignore soft clustering from our suite of machine learning algorithms.
What Is Clustering?
Sometimes our data is not labelled and we want to know how similar the data items in our sample are to each other. As an instance, we might be interested in determining whether a counterparty is a safe or an unsafe counterparty. Furthermore, sometimes we are interested to know how similar a data item in our sample is to all of the other data items.
These algorithms can help us distinguish bad data items from good data items.
What Is Hard Clustering?
Hard clustering is about grouping the data items such that each item is only assigned to one cluster. As an instance, we want the algorithm to read all of…
