Apply K-means and hierarchical clustering to transform data.

Free SOA Exam PA (Predictive Analytics) lesson in Data Transformations and Unsupervised Learning Techniques. 12 min read, ~1,852 words.

Clustering is unsupervised: it groups observations by similarity with no target variable. K-means needs you to fix the number of clusters K in advance; hierarchical does not. Standardize features first, or the largest-scale variable dominates the distance. Use an elbow plot (within-cluster sum of squares vs K) to choose K...

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