Technical GlossaryMachine Learning

Mean Shift

A clustering method that discovers clusters by seeking density modes and does not require the number of clusters in advance.

Mean Shift is a powerful clustering approach focused on discovering dense regions of the data distribution. Each point is shifted toward modes of the density function, and samples converging to similar endpoints are assigned to the same cluster. One important advantage is that the number of clusters does not need to be specified in advance. However, bandwidth choice and computational cost on large datasets can limit practicality.