Books by Boris Mirkin

Often considered more of an art than a science, books on clustering have been dominated by learning through example with techniques chosen almost through trial and error. Even the two most popular, and most related, clustering methodsΓÇöK-Means for partitioning and Ward''s method for hierarchical clusteringΓÇöhave lacked the theoretical underpinning required to establish a firm relationship between the two methods and relevant interpretation aids. Other approaches, such as spectral clustering or consensus clustering, are considered absolutely unrelated to each other or to the two above mentioned methods. Clustering: A Data Recovery Approach, Second Edition presents a unified modeling approach for the most popular clustering methods: the K-Means and hierarchical techniques, especially for divisive clustering. It significantly expands coverage of the mathematics of data recovery, and includes a new chapter covering more recent popular network clustering approachesΓÇöspectral, modularity and uniform, additive, and consensusΓÇötreated within the same data recovery approach. Another added chapter covers cluster validation and interpretation, including recent developments for ontology-driven interpretation of clusters. Altogether, the insertions added a hundred pages to the book, even in spite of the fact that fragments unrelated to the main topics were removed. Illustrated using a set of small real-world datasets and more than a hundred examples, the book is oriented towards students, practitioners, and theoreticians of cluster analysis. Covering topics that are beyond the scope of most texts, the authorΓÇÖs explanations of data recovery methods, theory-based advice, pre- and post-processing issues and his clear, practical instructions for real-world data mining make this book ideally suited for teaching, self-study, and professional reference.

This text examines the goals of data analysis with respect to enhancing knowledge, and identifies data summarization and correlation analysis as the core issues. Data summarization, both quantitative and categorical, is treated within the encoder-decoder paradigm bringing forward a number of mathematically supported insights into the methods and relations between them. Two Chapters describe methods for categorical summarization: partitioning, divisive clustering and separate cluster finding and another explain the methods for quantitative summarization, Principal Component Analysis and PageRank. Features:· An in-depth presentation of K-means partitioning including a corresponding Pythagorean decomposition of the data scatter. · Advice regarding such issues as clustering of categorical and mixed scale data, similarity and network data, interpretation aids, anomalous clusters, the number of clusters, etc.· Thorough attention to data-driven modelling including a number of mathematically stated relations between statistical and geometrical concepts including those between goodness-of-fit criteria for decision trees and data standardization, similarity and consensus clustering, modularity clustering and uniform partitioning.New edition highlights: · Inclusion of ranking issues such as Google PageRank, linear stratification and tied rankings median, consensus clustering, semi-average clustering, one-cluster clustering· Restructured to make the logics more straightforward and sections self-containedCore Data Analysis: Summarization, Correlation and Visualization is aimed at those who are eager to participate in developing the field as well as appealing to novices and practitioners.