|
Silhouette (clustering)
Silhouette refers to a method of interpretation and validation of consistency within clusters of data. The technique provides a succinct graphical representation of how well each object has been classified. It was proposed by Belgian statistician Peter Rousseeuw in 1987. The silhouette value is a measure of how similar an object is to its own cluster (cohesion) compared to other clusters (separation). The silhouette ranges from −1 to +1, where a high value indicates that the object is well matched to its own cluster and poorly matched to neighboring clusters. If most objects have a high value, then the clustering configuration is appropriate. If many points have a low or negative value, then the clustering configuration may have too many or too few clusters. The silhouette can be calculated with any distance metric, such as the Euclidean distance or the Manhattan distance. Definition Assume the data have been clustered via any technique, such as k-medoids or k-means, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cluster Analysis
Cluster analysis or clustering is the task of grouping a set of objects in such a way that objects in the same group (called a cluster) are more similar (in some sense) to each other than to those in other groups (clusters). It is a main task of exploratory data analysis, and a common technique for statistical data analysis, used in many fields, including pattern recognition, image analysis, information retrieval, bioinformatics, data compression, computer graphics and machine learning. Cluster analysis itself is not one specific algorithm, but the general task to be solved. It can be achieved by various algorithms that differ significantly in their understanding of what constitutes a cluster and how to efficiently find them. Popular notions of clusters include groups with small distances between cluster members, dense areas of the data space, intervals or particular statistical distributions. Clustering can therefore be formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Rousseeuw
Peter J. Rousseeuw (born 13 October 1956) is a statistician known for his work on robust statistics and cluster analysis. He obtained his PhD in 1981 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, following research carried out at the ETH in Zurich, which led to a book on influence functions. Later he was professor at the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Next he was a senior researcher at Renaissance Technologies. He then returned to Belgium as professor at KU Leuven, until becoming emeritus in 2022. His former PhD students include Annick Leroy, Hendrik Lopuhaä, Geert Molenberghs, Christophe Croux, Mia Hubert, Stefan Van Aelst, Tim Verdonck and Jakob Raymaekers. Research Rousseeuw has constructed and published many useful techniques. He proposed the Least Trimmed Squares method and S-estimators for robust regression, which can resist outliers in the data. He also introduced th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Distance
Distance is a numerical or occasionally qualitative measurement of how far apart objects or points are. In physics or everyday usage, distance may refer to a physical length or an estimation based on other criteria (e.g. "two counties over"). Since spatial cognition is a rich source of conceptual metaphors in human thought, the term is also frequently used metaphorically to mean a measurement of the amount of difference between two similar objects (such as statistical distance between probability distributions or edit distance between strings of text) or a degree of separation (as exemplified by distance between people in a social network). Most such notions of distance, both physical and metaphorical, are formalized in mathematics using the notion of a metric space. In the social sciences, distance can refer to a qualitative measurement of separation, such as social distance or psychological distance. Distances in physics and geometry The distance between physica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Euclidean Distance
In mathematics, the Euclidean distance between two points in Euclidean space is the length of a line segment between the two points. It can be calculated from the Cartesian coordinates of the points using the Pythagorean theorem, therefore occasionally being called the Pythagorean distance. These names come from the ancient Greek mathematicians Euclid and Pythagoras, although Euclid did not represent distances as numbers, and the connection from the Pythagorean theorem to distance calculation was not made until the 18th century. The distance between two objects that are not points is usually defined to be the smallest distance among pairs of points from the two objects. Formulas are known for computing distances between different types of objects, such as the distance from a point to a line. In advanced mathematics, the concept of distance has been generalized to abstract metric spaces, and other distances than Euclidean have been studied. In some applications in statistic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Manhattan Distance
A taxicab geometry or a Manhattan geometry is a geometry whose usual distance function or metric of Euclidean geometry is replaced by a new metric in which the distance between two points is the sum of the absolute differences of their Cartesian coordinates. The taxicab metric is also known as rectilinear distance, ''L''1 distance, ''L''1 distance or \ell_1 norm (see ''Lp'' space), snake distance, city block distance, Manhattan distance or Manhattan length. The latter names refer to the rectilinear street layout on the island of Manhattan, where the shortest path a taxi travels between two points is the sum of the absolute values of distances that it travels on avenues and on streets. The geometry has been used in regression analysis since the 18th century, and is often referred to as LASSO. The geometric interpretation dates to non-Euclidean geometry of the 19th century and is due to Hermann Minkowski. In \mathbb^2 , the taxicab distance between two points (x_1, y_1) and (x_2, y ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
K-medoids
The -medoids problem is a clustering problem similar to -means. The name was coined by Leonard Kaufman and Peter J. Rousseeuw with their PAM algorithm. Both the -means and -medoids algorithms are partitional (breaking the dataset up into groups) and attempt to minimize the distance between points labeled to be in a cluster and a point designated as the center of that cluster. In contrast to the -means algorithm, -medoids chooses actual data points as centers ( medoids or exemplars), and thereby allows for greater interpretability of the cluster centers than in -means, where the center of a cluster is not necessarily one of the input data points (it is the average between the points in the cluster). Furthermore, -medoids can be used with arbitrary dissimilarity measures, whereas -means generally requires Euclidean distance for efficient solutions. Because -medoids minimizes a sum of pairwise dissimilarities instead of a sum of squared Euclidean distances, it is more robust to no ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
K-means
''k''-means clustering is a method of vector quantization, originally from signal processing, that aims to partition ''n'' observations into ''k'' clusters in which each observation belongs to the cluster with the nearest mean (cluster centers or cluster centroid), serving as a prototype of the cluster. This results in a partitioning of the data space into Voronoi cells. ''k''-means clustering minimizes within-cluster variances ( squared Euclidean distances), but not regular Euclidean distances, which would be the more difficult Weber problem: the mean optimizes squared errors, whereas only the geometric median minimizes Euclidean distances. For instance, better Euclidean solutions can be found using k-medians and k-medoids. The problem is computationally difficult (NP-hard); however, efficient heuristic algorithms converge quickly to a local optimum. These are usually similar to the expectation-maximization algorithm for mixtures of Gaussian distributions via an iterative ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Medoids
Medoids are representative objects of a data set or a cluster within a data set whose sum of dissimilarities to all the objects in the cluster is minimal. Medoids are similar in concept to means or centroids, but medoids are always restricted to be members of the data set. Medoids are most commonly used on data when a mean or centroid cannot be defined, such as graphs. They are also used in contexts where the centroid is not representative of the dataset like in images and 3-D trajectories and gene expression (where while the data is sparse the medoid need not be). These are also of interest while wanting to find a representative using some distance other than squared euclidean distance (for instance in movie-ratings). For some data sets there may be more than one medoid, as with medians. A common application of the medoid is the k-medoids clustering algorithm, which is similar to the k-means algorithm but works when a mean or centroid is not definable. This algorithm basically wo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Davies–Bouldin Index
The Davies–Bouldin index (DBI), introduced by David L. Davies and Donald W. Bouldin in 1979, is a metric for evaluating clustering algorithms. This is an internal evaluation scheme, where the validation of how well the clustering has been done is made using quantities and features inherent to the dataset. This has a drawback that a good value reported by this method does not imply the best information retrieval. Preliminaries Given ''n'' dimensional points, let ''C''''i'' be a cluster of data points. Let ''X''''j'' be an ''n''-dimensional feature vector assigned to cluster ''C''''i''. : S_i = \left(\frac \sum_^ \right)^ Here A_i is the centroid of ''C''''i'' and ''T''''i'' is the size of the cluster ''i''. S_i is the ''q''th root of the ''q''th moment of the points in cluster ''i'' about the mean. If q=1 then S_i is the average distance between the feature vectors in cluster ''i'' and the centroid of the cluster. Usually the value of ''p'' is 2, which makes the dista ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Determining The Number Of Clusters In A Data Set
Determining the number of clusters in a data set, a quantity often labelled ''k'' as in the ''k''-means algorithm, is a frequent problem in data clustering Cluster analysis or clustering is the task of grouping a set of objects in such a way that objects in the same group (called a cluster) are more similar (in some sense) to each other than to those in other groups (clusters). It is a main task of ..., and is a distinct issue from the process of actually solving the clustering problem. For a certain class of clustering algorithms (in particular ''k''-means, K-medoid, ''k''-medoids and expectation–maximization algorithm), there is a parameter commonly referred to as ''k'' that specifies the number of clusters to detect. Other algorithms such as DBSCAN and OPTICS algorithm do not require the specification of this parameter; hierarchical clustering avoids the problem altogether. The correct choice of ''k'' is often ambiguous, with interpretations depending on the shape and scal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
