Clustering Stability and Ground Truth: Numerical Experiments

Maria José Amorim, Margarida Cardoso

2015

Abstract

Stability has been considered an important property for evaluating clustering solutions. Nevertheless, there are no conclusive studies on the relationship between this property and the capacity to recover clusters inherent to data (“ground truth”). This study focuses on this relationship resorting to synthetic data generated under diverse scenarios (controlling relevant factors). Stability is evaluated using a weighted cross-validation procedure. Indices of agreement (corrected for agreement by chance) are used both to assess stability and external validation. The results obtained reveal a new perspective so far not mentioned in the literature. Despite the clear relationship between stability and external validity when a broad range of scenarios is considered, within-scenarios conclusions deserve our special attention: faced with a specific clustering problem (as we do in practice), there is no significant relationship between stability and the ability to recover data clusters.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Amorim M. and Cardoso M. (2015). Clustering Stability and Ground Truth: Numerical Experiments . In Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management - Volume 1: KDIR, (IC3K 2015) ISBN 978-989-758-158-8, pages 259-264. DOI: 10.5220/0005597702590264

in Bibtex Style

@conference{kdir15,
author={Maria José Amorim and Margarida Cardoso},
title={Clustering Stability and Ground Truth: Numerical Experiments},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management - Volume 1: KDIR, (IC3K 2015)},
year={2015},
pages={259-264},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005597702590264},
isbn={978-989-758-158-8},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management - Volume 1: KDIR, (IC3K 2015)
TI - Clustering Stability and Ground Truth: Numerical Experiments
SN - 978-989-758-158-8
AU - Amorim M.
AU - Cardoso M.
PY - 2015
SP - 259
EP - 264
DO - 10.5220/0005597702590264