Clustering: How to cluster multiple CSV files that each represent a Steam user

Question

I am currently about to do clustering analysis regarding Steam users activity. So I have a thousands of CSV’s, each representing a Steam user and his/her purchased games (with ID and genre). I am planning to use k-modes clustering because my data is categorical, and I have found a python library k-modes. This is what a CSV file looks like, representing a random steam user.

I have researched a lot online, but it seems that many people have all their data in one CSV file, just like this example of stock exchange data.

How could I read each file and represent it as one unique data then do clustering on all the data among the thousands of CSV files?

Answer 1

You're likely going to have to do a little data wrangling to get the data in a better format.

I'm assuming each file has a varying amount of rows, one for each game the user purchased? So, you could create one big matrix with the rows representing users and the columns representing games, and create an indicator matrix for to map purchases to games. Then potentially add additional columns per user including additional insight, like:

• the number/percent of games purchased for each category(action, RPG, ...)
• total purchases

Having data in that format may lend to more useful application of clustering algorithms.

Answer 2

No algorithm directly works on the CSV data.

Even the people that use a single CSV fike will have to parse it and load the data into a suitable in memory representation.