Clustering is a fundamental technique in machine learning that discovers patterns and groups together similar data points, enabling machines to identify similarities and differences. It involves partitioning a dataset into different groups called clusters, where the data points in each cluster share similar characteristics or properties. Various types of clustering methods exist, including k-means, k-medoids, agglomerative clustering, divisive clustering, DBSCAN, and Gaussian mixture models (GMM). Clustering has numerous applications across multiple domains, such as customer segmentation, anomaly detection, image organization, data compression, and improving site search experiences.