A novel cluster internal evaluation index based on hyper-balls
This addresses the need for robust clustering evaluation in data analysis, particularly for noisy datasets and arbitrary cluster shapes, but it is incremental as it builds on existing internal evaluation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of evaluating clustering quality and determining the optimal number of clusters by proposing a new internal evaluation index based on hyper-balls (HCVI), which outperforms existing indices on synthetic and real datasets.
It is crucial to evaluate the quality and determine the optimal number of clusters in cluster analysis. In this paper, the multi-granularity characterization of the data set is carried out to obtain the hyper-balls. The cluster internal evaluation index based on hyper-balls(HCVI) is defined. Moreover, a general method for determining the optimal number of clusters based on HCVI is proposed. The proposed methods can evaluate the clustering results produced by the several classic methods and determine the optimal cluster number for data sets containing noises and clusters with arbitrary shapes. The experimental results on synthetic and real data sets indicate that the new index outperforms existing ones.