Abstract
Among the significant factors in assessing the suitability of a clustering technique to a given application is its stability; that is, how sensitive the algorithm is to perturbations in the input data. A number of techniques that appear to be suitable for measuring the stability of clustering have been published in the literature. The details about each of these measures, such as a description of the steps involved in their computation and an identification of precisely what they measure, are presented. These measures are considered in the context of analysing the stability characteristics of clustering techniques and are compared using a framework developed for this purpose. The question of generalizing some of these measures is addressed and the measures are also analyzed to identify conditions under which they can be reduced to one another.
This research has been supported in part by a grant from Natural Sciences and Research Council of Canada.
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Raghavan, V.V., Ip, M.Y.L. (1983). Techniques for measuring the stability of clustering: A comparative study. In: Salton, G., Schneider, HJ. (eds) Research and Development in Information Retrieval. SIGIR 1982. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 146. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0036348
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0036348
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