Application of Clustering Analysis in Gravity Databases

Clustering is a Data Mining technique which aims to analyze and describe data sets automatically, with or without a priori knowledge about them. Automatic analysis are used to simplify the human job in a data set study, which often is difficult due to the nature of the data or its complexity. Clustering analysis methods are used in several areas of knowledge to search and analyze patterns of a data set, and proved to be a powerful tool in multivariate analyses. These methods describe the data arranging them in several clusters, using a similarity metric. In this work some of these kind of clustering are discussed, and two of them are discussed in details: partitional and hierarchical agglomerative methods. To study the applicability of Data Mining in geophysical data sets clustering analysis methods are used to describe a gravity data set of an offshore area near of the northeast Brazilian coast, and the results demonstrates that clustering can become a powerful tool in geophysical research.