CLUSTERING CUSTOMERS

A computer implemented method for clustering customers includes receiving a source set of customer records, wherein each customer record represents one customer, and each customer record includes at least one data attribute, and each data attribute has an attribute value; pre-processing the source set of customer records to generate a pre-processed set of customer records; executing a clustering algorithm on the pre-processed set of customer records to group the pre-processed set of customer records into clusters of a pre-defined number. The pre-processing comprises: determining the type of a customer in the source set of customer records; using a type attribute value to indicate the type of the customer in its customer record; normalizing data attribute values and type attribute values; weighting to the data attribute values and the type attribute values respectively to obtain weighted attribute values of the data attribute and weighted attribute values of the type attribute.