BIRCH (balanced iterative reducing and clustering using hierarchies) is an unsupervised
data mining algorithm used to perform
hierarchical clustering over particularly large data-sets. An advantage of BIRCH is its ability to incrementally and dynamically cluster incoming, multi-dimensional metric
data points in an attempt to produce the best quality clustering for a given set of resources (memory and
time constraints). In most cases, BIRCH only requires a single scan of the database.