Clustering is a research area in machine learning and data mining that involves the grouping of data points into clusters based on their similarities. The goal of clustering is to discover hidden patterns in the data and to organize it into meaningful groups. There are various clustering algorithms, such as K-means, hierarchical clustering, and DBSCAN, that can be used to perform clustering on datasets. Clustering is widely used in various applications such as image segmentation, customer segmentation, anomaly detection, and more. It is an important technique for data analysis and pattern recognition.