point clouds in machine learning What is the purpose of point clouds in machine learning? 

Consider the following suggestion:
Say I have a table (per year) of records (such as days) each of which is made of n real numbers such as temperatures per hour). Can I use the table as a data point to do classification of the year as hot/cold or something like that?

Any real-world examples of point cloud data?
The term "point cloud" is normally used to refer to a set of points (locations) in 3D space.  So, a table of temperatures would normally not be called a "point cloud".