Describe cluster analysis and some of its applications

What will be an ideal response?

Cluster analysis is an exploratory data analysis tool for solving classification problems. The objective is to sort cases (e.g., people, things, events) into groups, or clusters, so that the degree of association is strong among members of the same cluster and weak among members of different clusters. Cluster analysis is an essential data mining method for classifying items, events, or concepts into common groupings called clusters. The method is commonly used in biology, medicine, genetics, social network analysis, anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, character recognition, and even in MIS development. As data mining has increased in popularity, the underlying techniques have been applied to business, especially to marketing. Cluster analysis has been used extensively for fraud detection (both credit card and e-commerce fraud) and market segmentation of customers in contemporary CRM systems.