Clustering is the task of assigning entities into groups based on similarities among those entities. The goal is to construct clusters in such a way that entities in one cluster are more closely related, i.e. similar to each other than entities in other clusters. As opposed to classification problems where the goal is to learn based on examples, clustering involves learning based on observation. For this reason, it is a form of unsupervised learning task.
There are many different clustering algorithms and a central notion in all of those is the definition of ’similarity’ between the entities that are being grouped. Different clustering algorithms may have different ways of measuring the similarity. In many clustering algorithms, another common notion is the so-called cluster center, which is a basis to represent the cluster. For example, in K-means clustering algorithm, the cluster center is the arithmetic mean position of all the points in that cluster.
This is a fairly lengthy article but if you want to get into machine learning with Spark, it’s a good one.