The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Feb. 01, 2000
Filed:
Oct. 07, 1996
Abstract
A method and apparatus for partitioning a data set for clustering, based on the physical properties of an inhomogeneous ferromagnet. No assumption is made regarding the underlying distribution of the data. A Potts spin is assigned to each data point and an interaction between neighboring points is introduced, whose strength is a decreasing function of the distance between the neighbors. This magnetic system exhibits three phases. At very low temperatures it is completely ordered; i.e. all spins are aligned. At very high temperatures the system does not exhibit any ordering and in an intermediate regime clusters of relatively strongly coupled spins become ordered, whereas different clusters remain uncorrelated. This intermediate phase is identified by a jump in the order parameters. The spin--spin correlation function is used to partition the spins and the corresponding data points into clusters.