Clustering of users in a dataset

Question

I have a dataset of book reviews:

| user_id | ISBN | vote | votes_for_user | average_user_vote | ISBN_categ |
   213      3242X   4.5        12                  3.4             1 
   563      1245X   3.2        74                  2.3             2

where

  vote = rating given by user to a certain book
  votes_for_user = number of votes the user has in the dataset (nr of rows)
  average_user_vote = average of a user's votes
  ISBN_categ = integer categorical of the ISBN (since that is a string).

I want to apply a clustering algorithm such as DBSCAN to see how many clusters I can form with this dataset.

My question is: Should I apply the clustering on the dataframe as it is (minus the ISBN column) or should I construct more features for every user and construct a dataframe where every user appears only once, together with their features, and cluster that?

Remember, the intent here is to cluster users (by user_id), not data points (votes).

Answer 1

If your objective is to find clusters of users, then you are interested in finding groups of "similar" reviewers.

Therefore you should:

1. Retain information which relates to the users in a meaningful way - e.g. votes_for_user.
2. Discard information which has no meaningful relationship to a user - e.g. user_id (unless perhaps it contains some information such as time / order).
3. Be mindful of fields which may contain implicit relationships involving a user - e.g. vote may be a result of the interaction between user and ISBN.