English

To Cluster, or Not to Cluster: An Analysis of Clusterability Methods

Machine Learning 2018-10-30 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Clustering is an essential data mining tool that aims to discover inherent cluster structure in data. For most applications, applying clustering is only appropriate when cluster structure is present. As such, the study of clusterability, which evaluates whether data possesses such structure, is an integral part of cluster analysis. However, methods for evaluating clusterability vary radically, making it challenging to select a suitable measure. In this paper, we perform an extensive comparison of measures of clusterability and provide guidelines that clustering users can reference to select suitable measures for their applications.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1808.08317,
  title  = {To Cluster, or Not to Cluster: An Analysis of Clusterability Methods},
  author = {A. Adolfsson and M. Ackerman and N. C. Brownstein},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.08317},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

30 pages, 3 figures, 10 tables