Comparative study of data mining tools used for clustering

Clustering, a component of data mining is the process of grouping objects into several clusters such that objects in the same cluster have maximum similarity while the objects in different clusters has maximum dissimilarity. Clustering has been used in diverse fields including Text Mining, Pattern recognition, Image analysis, Bioinformatics, Machine Learning, Voice mining, Image processing, Web cluster engines, Whether report analysis etc. To perform the task of clustering, various data mining tools are freely available. These tools have their own features and carry out efficiently the task of generating clusters automatically for a given set of data. This paper discusses seven such tools in detail. A comparative study of these tools has been also done on basis of various parameters as License type of the tool, Programming Language used by tool, Interface provided by the tool, Developer of the tool etc. The goal is to provide the users/researchers all the necessary details about these clustering tools so that it may help them to select an appropriate tool for their use in cluster analysis.