Clustering Relational Database Entities Using K-means

The fast evolution of hardware and the internet made large volumes of data more accessible. This data is composed of heterogeneous data types such as text, numbers, multimedia, and others. Non-overlapping research communities work on processing homogeneous data types. Nevertheless, from the user perspective, these heterogeneous data types should behave and be accessed in a similar fashion. Processing heterogeneous data types, which is Heterogeneous Data Mining (HDM), is a complex task. However, the HDM by Unified Vectorization (HDM-UV) seems to be an appropriate solution for this problem because it permits to process the heterogeneous data types simultaneously. In this paper, we use K-means and Self-Organizing Maps for simultaneously processing textual and numerical data types by UV. We evaluate how the HDM-UV improves the clustering results of these two algorithms (SOM, K-means) by comparing them to the traditional homogeneous data processing. Furthermore, we compare the clustering results of the two algorithms applied to a data integration problem.