There are a number of ways of determining the distance between two points, but for plotting points on a 2-D graph you probably want the Euclidean distance. If (x1, y1)
represents your first point and (x2, y2)
represents your second, the distance is
d = sqrt( (x2-x1)^2 + (y2-y1)^2 )
Regarding grouping, you may want to use some sort of 2-D mean to determine how “close” things are to each other. For example, if you have three points, (x1, y1)
, (x2, y2)
, (x3, y3)
, you can find the center of these three points by simple averaging:
x(mean) = (x1+x2+x3)/3
y(mean) = (y1+y2+y3)/3
You can then see how close each is to the center to determine whether it should be part of the “cluster”.
There are a number of ways one can define clusters, all of which use some variant of a clustering algorithm. I’m in a rush now and don’t have time to summarize, but check out the link and the algorithms, and hopefully other people will be able to provide more detail. Good luck!