In Data mining, ______ is a method of incremental conceptual clustering.
2016
In Data mining, ______ is a method of incremental conceptual clustering.
- A.
STRING
- B.
COBWEB
- C.
CORBA
- D.
OLAD
Attempted by 38 students.
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: B
Answer: COBWEB
Why this is correct:
COBWEB incrementally builds a hierarchical (tree) structure of concepts by processing instances one at a time and updating the tree.
It represents concepts using attribute-value statistics and evaluates cluster quality with the Category Utility (CU) measure to guide create/merge/split decisions.
Because it updates the concept hierarchy as each example arrives, COBWEB is classified as an incremental conceptual clustering method.
The algorithm was proposed by J. R. Fisher (1987) and is a standard example of incremental conceptual clustering.
Why the other choices are incorrect:
STRING is not an algorithm for conceptual clustering; it commonly refers to textual data or data types.
CORBA is middleware (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) for distributed objects and is unrelated to clustering.
OLAD is not a recognized incremental conceptual clustering algorithm (it may be a misspelling or confusion with OLAP) and therefore is not the correct method.
Key takeaway: COBWEB is the canonical incremental conceptual clustering algorithm because it updates a hierarchical concept structure one instance at a time using a category utility metric.