Cluster Analysis

Lecture 39-40-41-42-43/27-10-
09/29-10-09/30-10-09/02-11-
09/03-11-09

1
 What is Cluster Analysis?
• Finding groups of objects such that the objects in a group will be similar (or related)
to one another and different from (or unrelated to) the objects in other groups

Inter-cluster
Intra-cluster distances are
distances are maximized
minimized

•Clustering is unsupervised
classification: no predefined
classes 2
 What is not Cluster Analysis?

• Supervised classification
– Have class label information

• Simple segmentation
– Dividing students into different registration groups
alphabetically, by last name

• Results of a query
– Groupings are a result of an external specification

3
Notion of a Cluster can be Ambiguous

How many clusters? Six Clusters

Two Clusters Four Clusters

4
 Types of Clusterings
• A clustering is a set of clusters
• Important distinction between hierarchical and
partitional sets of clusters
• Partitional Clustering
– A division of data objects into non-overlapping subsets
(clusters) such that each data object is in exactly one subset

• Hierarchical clustering
– A set of nested clusters organized as a hierarchical tree

5
 Partitional Clustering

Original Points A Partitional Clustering

6
 Hierarchical Clustering

p1
p3 p4
p2
p1 p2 p3 p4

Hierarchical Clustering Dendrogram

7
Agglomerative and Divisive

8
 Different Types of Clusters
• Exclusive versus non-exclusive
(overlapping)
– The clusters shown on slide 4 are all exclusive.
– In non-exclusive clusters, points may belong to
multiple clusters. E.g. a person enrolled as a
student in a university can also be an employee of
the university.

• Fuzzy versus non-fuzzy

– In fuzzy clustering, a point belongs to every cluster
with some weight between 0 and 1 ( 0 means
doesn’t belong at all & 1 means belongs absolutely)
– Weights must sum to 1
– Probabilistic clustering has similar characteristics
9
• Partial versus Complete
– A complete clustering assigns every
object to a cluster whereas partial
clustering does not.
– The motivation behind partial clustering
is that some objects in a data set may
not belong to a well-defined groups.

10
 Types of Clusters
• 1. Well-separated clusters

• 2. clusters (prototype based)

• 3. Contiguous clusters (graph-based)

• 4.Density-based clusters

• 5.Property or Conceptual

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Types of Clusters: Well-Separated
• Well-Separated Clusters:
– A cluster is a set of points such that any point in a
cluster is closer (or more similar) to every other
point in the cluster than to any point not in the
cluster.
– The distance between any two points in different
groups is larger than the distance between any two
points within a group.

3 well-separated clusters
12
 Types of Clusters: Center-Based
• Center-based (prototype-based)
– A cluster is a set of objects such that an object in a
cluster is closer (more similar) to the “center” of a
cluster, than to the center of any other cluster
– The center of a cluster is often a centroid, the
average of all the points in the cluster, or a medoid,
the most “representative” point of a cluster

4 center-based clusters
Each point in a cluster is closer to the center of its cluster
than to any other cluster.
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Contiguity-based Clusters (Nearest neighbor
or graph-based)
– If the data is represented as a graph, where the
nodes are objects and links represent connections
among objects, then a cluster can be defined as
Connected component
– Here cluster is a set of points such that a point in a
cluster is closer (or more similar) to one or more
other points in the cluster than to any point in other
clusters.

8 contiguous clusters
14
 Types of Clusters: Density-Based
• Density-based
– A cluster is a dense region of points, which is
separated by low-density regions, from other
regions of high density.
– Used when the clusters are irregular or intertwined,
and when noise and outliers are present.

6 density-based clusters

A contiguity-based definition of cluster will not work well for

data shown in above figure. 15
 Conceptual Clusters
• Shared Property or Conceptual Clusters
– Finds clusters that share some common property or
represent a particular concept.
– A clustering algo would need very specific concept
of a cluster to detect these as clusters.
.

2 Overlapping Circles

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Characteristics of the Input Data Are
Important
• Type of proximity or density measure
– This is a derived measure, but central to clustering
• Sparseness
– Dictates type of similarity
– Adds to efficiency
• Attribute type
– Dictates type of similarity
• Type of Data
– Dictates type of similarity
– Other characteristics, e.g., autocorrelation
• Dimensionality
• Noise and Outliers
• Type of Distribution

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 Clustering Algorithms
• K-means and its variants

• Hierarchical clustering

• Density-based clustering

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 K-means Clustering – Details
This is prototype based clustering algorithm.
• Initial centroids are often chosen randomly.
Clusters produced vary from one run to another.
•
–The centroid is (typically) the mean of the
points in the cluster.
• A centroid almost never correspond to an actual data point.
• ‘Closeness’ is measured by Euclidean distance, cosine similarity, correlation, etc.
• K-means will converge for common similarity measures mentioned above.
• Most of the convergence happens in the first few iterations.
•

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 K-means Clustering

Partitional clustering approach

• Each cluster is associated with a centroid (center point)
• Each point is assigned to the cluster with the closest centroid
• Number of clusters, K, must be specified
• The basic algorithm is very simple
•

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Two different K-means Clusterings
3

2.5

2
Original Points
1.5

y
1

0.5

-2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2

x

3 3

2.5 2.5

2 2

1.5 1.5
y

y
1 1

0.5 0.5

0 0

-2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 -2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2

x x

Optimal Clustering Sub-optimal Clustering

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Importance of Choosing Initial
Centroids
Iteration6
1
2
3
4
5
3

2.5

1.5
y

0.5

-2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2

x

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 Importance of Choosing Initial
Centroids
Iteration1 Iteration2 Iteration3
3 3 3

2.5 2.5 2.5

2 2 2

1.5 1.5 1.5

y

y
1 1 1

0.5 0.5 0.5

0 0 0

-2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 -2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 -2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2
x x x

Iteration4 Iteration5 Iteration6

3 3 3

2.5 2.5 2.5

2 2 2

1.5 1.5 1.5

y

y
1 1 1

0.5 0.5 0.5

0 0 0

-2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 -2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 -2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2
x x x

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 Evaluating K-means Clusters

• Most common measure is Sum of Squared Error (SSE)

– For each point, the error is the distance to the nearest cluster.
– Calculate error of each data point, i.e. its Euclidean distance to
the closest centroid (mean) and then compute the total sum of
the squared errors.
– To get SSE, we square these errors and sum them.

– x is a data point in cluster Ci and mi is the representative point for

cluster Ci K
SSE = ∑∑dist ( m , x )
2
i
• can show that mi corresponds to the center (mean) of the cluster
i =1 x∈Ci

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– Centroid of a cluster containing 6 data objects (1,2),
(2,3),(3,2),(5,3),(5,7) and (6,7) is
((1+2+3+5+5+6)/6=22/6=3.67,
(2+3+2+3+7+7)/6=24/6=4)
– So (3.67,4) is the centroid of these set of points.

– Given two clusters, we can choose the one with the

smallest error
– One easy way to reduce SSE is to increase K, the
number of clusters
• A good clustering with smaller K can have a lower SSE than
a poor clustering with higher K

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• K-means Clustering for document data
• K-means clustering is not restricted to
spatial data but we can also consider
other kinds of data such as text data.
• But the proximity measure can’t be
Euclidean distance. One measure for text
data is Cosine measure.
• Suppose document data is represented by
document term matrix as follows:

26
• Our aim is to maximize the similarity of the
documents in a cluster to the centroid of the
cluster. This quantity for text data is termed as
cohesion of the cluster.
k
Total cohesion= ∑ ∑ cos ine( x, mi )
i =1 x∈C
i

where x is a data object and mi is the centroid of

the cluster.

27
 Importance of Choosing Initial
Centroids …
Iteration1 Iteration2
3 3

2.5 2.5

2 2

1.5 1.5
y

y
1 1

0.5 0.5

0 0

-2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 -2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2

x x

Iteration3 Iteration4 Iteration5

3 3 3

2.5 2.5 2.5

2 2 2

1.5 1.5 1.5

y

y
1 1 1

0.5 0.5 0.5

0 0 0

-2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 -2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 -2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2
x x x

28
 Problems with Selecting Initial
Points
If there are K ‘real’ clusters then the chance of selecting one centroid from each cluster is small.
• Sometimes the initial centroids will readjust themselves in ‘right’ way, and sometimes they don’t
–
Consider an example of five pairs of clusters
–

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30
31
32
 10 Clusters Example
Iteration4
1
2
3
8

2
y

-2

-4

-6

0 5 10 15 20
x
Starting with two initial centroids in one cluster of each pair of clusters
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 10 Clusters Example
Iteration1 Iteration2
8 8

6 6

4 4

2 2
y

y
0 0

-2 -2

-4 -4

-6 -6

0 5 10 15 20 0 5 10 15 20
x x
Iteration3 Iteration4
8 8

6 6

4 4

2 2
y

y
0 0

-2 -2

-4 -4

-6 -6

0 5 10 15 20 0 5 10 15 20
x x

Starting with two initial centroids in one cluster of each pair of clusters
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 10 Clusters Example
Iteration4
1
2
3
8

2
y

-2

-4

-6

0 5 10 15 20
x
Starting with some pairs of clusters having three initial centroids, while other have only
one. 35
 10 Clusters Example
Iteration1 Iteration2
8 8

6 6

4 4

2 2
y

y
0 0

-2 -2

-4 -4

-6 -6

0 5 10 15 20 0 5 10 15 20
Iteratio
xn3 Iteratio
xn4
8 8

6 6

4 4

2 2
y

y
0 0

-2 -2

-4 -4

-6 -6

0 5 10 15 20 0 5 10 15 20
x x

Starting with some pairs of clusters having three initial centroids, while other have only
one. 36
 Solutions to Selection of Initial
• Multiple runs Centroids
– Helps, but repeated runs may not overcome
the problems associated with random initial
values of K completely.

• One solution is to consider sample of the

points and use hierarchical clustering
techniques to determine initial centroids.
– This approach works well if sample is small
and k is also relatively small as compared to
sample of data objects.

37
• Select more than k initial centroids and then
select among these initial centroids
– Select most widely separated
– Such an approach can select outliers as an initial
centroid rather than points in the dense regions.

• The space requirement of k-means are

modest as only the data points and their
centroids are stored.

38
 Additional issues of K-means
Handling Empty Clusters
• Basic K-means algorithm can yield empty
clusters if no points have been allocated to a
cluster in the assignment step.

• Several strategies
– Choose the point that contributes most to SSE i.e.,
the point which is farthest from any current centroid.
– Another way can be, choose a centroid (point) from
the cluster with the highest SSE. This will split the
cluster and reduce the overall SSE of the clustering.
– If there are several empty clusters, the above can be
repeated several times.

39
 Additional issues contd…
• Outliers:
– Outliers can unnecessarily influence the
clusters, if SSE criteria is used.
– If outliers are present , the resulting cluster
centroids may not be as representative of a
cluster as in the absence of outliers.
– Also, SSE will be larger.
– So, it is better to eliminate outliers before
applying k-means algorithm.

40
Reducing SSE with Postprocessing
• SSE can be reduced by increasing the no.
of clusters that is by increasing the value of
k.
• Some strategies are used where SSE is
reduced but the no. of clusters are fixed up
(without increasing the no. of clusters).
• The strategy is to focus on each individual
cluster since total SSE is simply the sum of
SSE’s contributed by each cluster.
• Total SSE can be changed by splitting or
merging of clusters.
41
• Two strategies that decrease the total
SSE by increasing the no of clusters:
• Split a cluster: the cluster with the largest SSE is
split.
• Introduce a new cluster centroid: the point that is
farthest from any cluster center is chosen.
• Two strategies that decrease the no of
clusters and minimize the increase in total
SSE:
• Disperse a cluster: remove the centroid of the
cluster that contributes to the Total SSE the least.
Assign the data points to other clusters.
• Merge two clusters: the clusters with the closest
centroids are chosen and merged.
42
 Updating Centers Incrementally
• In the basic K-means algorithm, centroids are
updated after all points are assigned to a centroid
• An alternative is to update the centroids after each
assignment (incremental approach)
– This requires either 0 or 2 updates to cluster centroids at
each step, as a point either moves to a new cluster( 2
updates) or stays in the current cluster (0 updates)

43
– Never get an empty cluster since all clusters
start with a single data point.
– Can use “weights” to change the impact.
– One drawback of incremental update is order
dependency
– The clusters may get affected by the order,
points are processed.

44
 Pre-processing and Post-
processing
• Pre-processing
– Normalize the data
– Eliminate outliers

• Post-processing
– Eliminate small clusters that may represent outliers
– Split ‘loose’ clusters, i.e., clusters with relatively high
SSE
– Merge clusters that are ‘close’ and that have relatively
low SSE

45
 Bisecting K-means

Bisecting K-means algorithm

• Variant of K-means that can produce a partitional or a hierarchical clustering
–

46
Bisecting K-means Example

47
 Limitations of K-means
• K-means has problems when clusters are of
differing
– Sizes
– Densities
– Non-globular shapes

• K-means has problems when the data contains

outliers.
• K-means is restricted to data for which there is a
notion of centroid .

48
Limitations of K-means: Differing
Sizes

Original Points K-means (3 Clusters)

49
Limitations of K-means: Differing
Density

Original Points K-means (3 Clusters)

50
Limitations of K-means: Non-globular
Shapes

Original Points K-means (2 Clusters)

51
Overcoming K-means Limitations

Original Points K-means Clusters

One solution is to use many clusters.

Find parts of clusters, but need to put together.
52
Overcoming K-means Limitations

Original Points K-means Clusters

53
Overcoming K-means Limitations

Original Points K-means Clusters

54
 Hierarchical Clustering
• Produces a set of nested clusters
organized as a hierarchical tree
• Can be visualized as a dendrogram
– A tree like diagram that records the
sequences of merges or splits
6 5
0
.2
4
0
.1
5 3 4
2
5
0
.1 2

0
.0
5 1
3 1
0
1 3 2 5 4 6 55
 Hierarchical Clustering
• Do not have to assume any particular
number of clusters
– Any desired number of clusters can be
obtained by ‘cutting’ the dendogram at the
proper level

56
 Hierarchical Clustering
• Two main types of hierarchical clustering
– Agglomerative:
• Start with the points as individual clusters
• At each step, merge the closest pair of clusters until only one cluster (or k clusters) left

– Divisive:
• Start with one, all-inclusive cluster
• At each step, split a cluster until each cluster contains a point (or there are k clusters)

• Traditional hierarchical algorithms use a similarity or distance

matrix
– Merge or split one cluster at a time

57
 Agglomerative Clustering Algorithm
• Basic algorithm is straightforward
1. Compute the proximity matrix
2. Let each data point be a cluster
3. Repeat
4. Merge the two closest clusters
5. Update the proximity matrix
6. Until only a single cluster remains

• Key operation is the computation of the proximity

of two clusters
– Different approaches to defining the distance between
clusters distinguish the different algorithms

58
 Starting Situation
• Start with clusters of individual points and
a proximity matrix p1 p2 p3 p4 p5 ...
p1

p2
p3

p4
p5
.
.
. Proximity Matrix

...
p1 p2 p3 p4 p9 p10 p11

59
 Intermediate Situation
• After some merging steps, we have some clusters
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5
C1

C2
C3
C3
C4
C4
C5

Proximity Matrix
C1

C2 C5

...
p1 p2 p3 p4 p9 p10 p11
60
 Intermediate Situation
• We want to merge the two closest clusters (C2 and
C5) and update the proximity matrix.
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5
C1

C2
C3
C3
C4
C4
C5

Proximity Matrix
C1

C2 C5

... 61
p1 p2 p3 p4 p9 p10 p11
 After Merging
• The question is “How do we update the proximity
C2
matrix?” U
C1 C5 C3 C4

C1 ?

C2 U C5 ? ? ? ?
C3
C3 ?
C4
C4 ?

Proximity Matrix
C1

C2 U C5

... 62
p1 p2 p3 p4 p9 p10 p11
 How to Define Inter-Cluster Similarity
p1 p2 p3 p4 p5 ...
p1
Similarity?
p2

p3

p4

p5
• MIN
.
• MAX .
• Group Average .
Proximity Matrix
• Distance Between Centroids
• Other methods driven by an
objective function
– Ward’s Method uses squared error
63
 How to Define Inter-Cluster
Similarity
p1 p2 p3 p4 p5 ...
p1

p2

p3

p4

p5
• MIN(Single Link)
.
• MAX(complete link) .
• Group Average .
Proximity Matrix
• Distance Between Centroids
• Other methods driven by an
objective function
– Ward’s Method uses squared error
64
 Single-linkage
In single-linkage clusters, the distance between
any two clusters C1 and C2 is minimum of all
distances from an object in cluster C1 to an
object in C2

65
 Strength of MIN

Original Points Two Clusters

• Can handle non-elliptical shapes

66
 Limitations of MIN

Original Points Two Clusters

• Sensitive to noise and outliers

67
Hierarchical Clustering: MIN

5
1
3
5 0
.2

2 1 0
.1
5

2 3 6 0
.1

0
.0
5

4
4 0
3 6 2 5 4 1

Nested Clusters Dendrogram

68
• Example:

69
 How to Define Inter-Cluster
Similarity
p1 p2 p3 p4 p5 ...
p1

p2

p3

p4

p5
• MIN
.
• MAX(Complete Link) .
• Group Average .
Proximity Matrix
• Distance Between Centroids
• Other methods driven by an
objective function
– Ward’s Method uses squared error
70
 Complete-linkage
In complete-linkage clusters, the distance between
two clusters C1 and C2 is maximum of all distances
from an object in cluster C1 to an object in cluster
C2 as shown in figure below. It generates closely
packed clusters.

71
 Strength of MAX

Original Points Two Clusters

• Less susceptible to noise and outliers

72
 Limitations of MAX

Original Points Two Clusters

•Tends to break large clusters

•Biased towards globular clusters
73
 How to Define Inter-Cluster Similarity
p1 p2 p3 p4 p5 ...
p1

p2

p3

p4

p5
• MIN
.
• MAX .
• Group Average .
Proximity Matrix
• Distance Between Centroids
• Other methods driven by an
objective function
– Ward’s Method uses squared error
74
 Average-linkage
In average-linkage clusters, the distance between two
clusters C1 and C2 is the average of all distances of
objects from an object in cluster C1 to an object in
cluster C2 as revealed in Fig.

75
 Hierarchical Clustering: Group
Average
• Compromise between Single and
Complete Link

• Strengths
– Less susceptible to noise and outliers

• Limitations
– Biased towards globular clusters
76
 How to Define Inter-Cluster
Similarity
p1 p2 p3 p4 p5 ...
p1

× × p2

p3

p4

p5
• MIN
.
• MAX .
• Group Average .
Proximity Matrix
• Distance Between Centroids
• Other methods driven by an
objective function
– Ward’s Method uses squared error
77
Cluster Similarity: MIN or Single
Link
• Similarity of two clusters is based on the
two most similar (closest) points in the
different clusters
– Determined by one pair of points, i.e., by one
link in the proximity graph.
I1 I2 I3 I4 I5
I1 1.00 0.90 0.10 0.65 0.20
I2 0.90 1.00 0.70 0.60 0.50
I3 0.10 0.70 1.00 0.40 0.30
I4 0.65 0.60 0.40 1.00 0.801 2 3 4 5

I5 0.20 0.50 0.30 0.80 1.00 78

 Cluster Similarity: MAX or
Complete Linkage
• Similarity of two clusters is based on the
two least similar (most distant) points in
the different clusters
– Determined by all pairs of points in the two
I1 I2 I3 I4 I5
clusters
I1 1 .00 0.90 0.10 0.65 0.20
I2 0 .90 1.00 0.70 0.60 0.50
I3 0 .10 0.70 1.00 0.40 0.30
I4 0 .65 0.60 0.40 1.00 0.80
1 2 3 4 5

79
I5 0 .20 0.50 0.30 0.80 1.00
Hierarchical Clustering: MAX

4 1
2 5 0
.4

0
.3
5
5
2 0
.3

0
.2
5

3 6
0
.2

3 0
.1
5

1 0
.1

4 0
.0
5

0
3 6 4 1 2 5

Nested Clusters Dendrogram

80
 Cluster Similarity: Group
Average
• Proximity of two clusters is the average of pairwise proximity
between points in the two clusters.

∑ proximity(p ,p )
pi∈Cluster
i j
i
pj∈Clusterj
proximity(
Cluster j) =
i , Cluster
|Clusteri | ∗|Clusterj |

• Need to use average connectivity for scalability since total

proximity favors large clusters

I1 I2 I3 I4 I5
I1 1.00 0.90 0.10 0.65 0.20
I2 0.90 1.00 0.70 0.60 0.50
1 2 3 4 5
I3 0.10 0.70 1.00 0.40 0.30 81
Hierarchical Clustering: Group
Average
5 4 1
2
0
.2
5

5 0
.2
2
0
.1
5

3 6 0
.1

1 0
.0
5

4 0
3 3 6 4 1 2 5

Nested Clusters Dendrogram

82
 Cluster Similarity: Ward’s Method
• The proximity between two clusters is based on the
increase in squared error that results when two clusters are
merged
– Similar to group average if distance between points is distance
squared

• Less susceptible to noise and outliers

• Biased towards globular clusters

• Hierarchical analogue of K-means

– Can be used to initialize K-means

83
 Hierarchical Clustering: Time and
Space requirements
• O(N2) space since it uses the proximity matrix.
– N is the number of points.

• O(N3) time in many cases

– There are N steps and at each step the size, N2, proximity matrix
must be updated and searched
– Complexity can be reduced to O(N2 log(N) ) time for some
approaches

84
85
86
87
88
89
Hierarchical Clustering: Comparison
5
1 4 1
3
2 5
5 5
2 1 2
MIN MAX
2 3 6 3 6
3
1
4 4
4

5
1 5 4 1
2 2
5 Ward’s Method 5
2 2
3 6 Group Average 3 6
3
4 1 1
4 4
3

90
 Hierarchical Clustering: Problems and
Limitations
• Once a decision is made to combine two clusters, it
cannot be undone

• No objective function is directly minimized

• Different schemes have problems with one or more

of the following:
– Sensitivity to noise and outliers
– Difficulty handling different sized clusters and convex
shapes
– Breaking large clusters

91
 MST: Divisive Hierarchical
Clustering
• Build MST (Minimum Spanning Tree)
– Start with a tree that consists of any point
– In successive steps, look for the closest pair of points
(p, q) such that one point (p) is in the current tree but
the other (q) is not
– Add q to the tree and put an edge between p and q

92
 MST: Divisive Hierarchical
Clustering
• Use MST for constructing hierarchy of
clusters

93
 DBSCAN
• DBSCAN is a density-based algorithm.

• DBSCAN is based on center-based approach.

– Density = number of points within a specified radius (Eps)
– A point is a core point if it has more than a specified number
of points (MinPts) within Eps
• These are points that are at the interior of a cluster
– A border point has fewer points than MinPts within Eps, but is
in the neighborhood of a core point
– A noise point is any point that is not a core point or a border
point.

94
DBSCAN: Core, Border, and Noise
Points Minpts =4
Eps=1

95
Core pts, Border Pts and Noise
Eps =1, Minpts= 5

96
 DBSCAN algo
• 1: Label all points as core, border, or
noise points.
• 2: Eliminate noise points.
• 3: Put an edge between all core points
that are within Eps of each other.
• 4: Make a group of connected core
points into a separate cluster.
• 5: assign each border point to one of
the clusters of its associated core points.
97
DBSCAN: Core, Border and Noise
Points

Original Points Point types: core,

border and noise

Eps = 10, MinPts = 4

98
 An Example of DBSCAN

Original Points

Clusters
• As DBSCAN uses density based definition of a cluster, it
is relatively resistant to Noise.
• Can handle clusters of different shapes and sizes.
•DBSCAN can find many clusters that could not be found
using k-means such as shown above.
99
 When DBSCAN Does NOT Work Well

Original Points
(MinPts=4, Eps=9.75).
• DBSCAN has trouble when
clusters have varying densities
• it also has trouble when data is
high-dimensional b’coz density is
difficult to define for such data.
•DBSCAN can be expensive when
the computation of NN requires
computing all pairwise proximities
for high dim data. (MinPts=4, Eps=9.92)
100
DBSCAN: Determining EPS and MinPts
• The basic approach is to look at the behavior
of the distance (k-dist) between a point and
its kth NN.
• Idea is that for points in a cluster, their kth
nearest neighbors are at roughly the same
distance
• Noise points have the kth nearest neighbor at
farther distance
• So, plot sorted distance of every point to its kth
nearest neighbor

101
 Cluster Validity
• For supervised classification we have a variety of measures to
evaluate how good our model is
– Accuracy, precision, recall

• For cluster analysis, the analogous question is how to evaluate the

“goodness” of the resulting clusters?

• But “clusters are in the eye of the beholder”!

• Then why do we want to evaluate them?

– To avoid finding patterns in noise
– To compare clustering algorithms
– To compare two sets of clusters
– To compare two clusters

102
 Clusters found in Random Data
1 1

0.9 0.9

0.8 0.8

0.7 0.7

Random 0.6 0.6 DBSCAN

Points
y

0.5

y
0.5

0.4 0.4

0.3 0.3

0.2 0.2

0.1 0.1

0 0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
x x
1 1

0.9 0.9

K-means 0.8 0.8

Complete
0.7 0.7
Link
0.6 0.6
y

0.5 0.5

0.4 0.4

0.3 0.3

0.2 0.2

0.1 0.1

0 0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
x x
103
 Different Aspects of Cluster Validation
1. Determining the clustering tendency of a set of data, i.e.,
distinguishing whether non-random structure actually
exists in the data.
2. Determining the ‘correct’ number of clusters.
3. Evaluating how well the results of a cluster analysis fit
the data without reference to external information.
- Use only the data
1. Comparing the results of a cluster analysis to externally
known results, e.g., to externally given class labels
2. Comparing the results of two different sets of cluster
analyses to determine which is better.

• 1,2,3 do not make use of any external information

• For 3,4,5 we want to evaluate the entire clustering or just
the individual cluster.

104
 Measures of cluster validity

Measures of
cluster validity

Internal External
Relative
(unsupervised)) (supervised)

105
 Measures of Cluster Validity
• Numerical measures that are applied to judge various
aspects of cluster validity, are classified into the
following three types.
– External Index (supervised): Used to measure the extent to which
cluster labels match externally supplied class labels.
• Entropy
– Internal Index (unsupervised): Used to measure the extent to
which cluster labels match externally supplied class labels.
• Sum of Squared Error (SSE)
– Relative Index: Used to compare two different clusterings or
clusters.
• Often an external or internal index is used for this function,
e.g., SSE or entropy
• Sometimes these are referred to as criteria instead of
indices
– However, sometimes criterion is the general strategy and index is
the numerical measure that implements the criterion.

106
• Internal (unsupervised):
– Used to measure the extent to which cluster labels
match externally supplied class labels.
– E.g. Sum of Squared Error (SSE)
– Unsupervised measures are again divided into two
classes:
• Cluster cohesion: checks for cluster tightness and
compactness
• Cluster separation: checks how well separated or distinct
clusters are.
– These measures use only information provided in the
data so they are called internal measures.

107
• External (supervised):
– Used to measure the extent to which cluster
labels match externally supplied class labels.
– E.g. entropy, which measures how well cluster
labels match externally supplied labels.
– These measures are called external
measures b’coz, the information used for
evaluation is not present in the data.

108
• Relative:
– Used to compare two different clusterings or
clusters.
– This cluster evaluation measure can be
supervised or unsupervised evaluation
measure.
– E.g. K-means clusterings can be compared
using either SSE or entropy.

109
 Unsupervised evaluation using proximity
matrix
• Two matrices
– Proximity Matrix
– “Incidence” Matrix
• One row and one column for each data point
• An entry is 1 if the associated pair of points belong to the same cluster
• An entry is 0 if the associated pair of points belongs to different clusters

• Compute the correlation between the two matrices

– Since the matrices are symmetric, only the correlation between
n(n-1) / 2 entries needs to be calculated.

• High correlation indicates that points that belong to the

same cluster are close to each other.
• Not a good measure for some density or contiguity based
clusters.

110
 Unsupervised: Measuring Cluster
Validity Via Correlation
• Correlation between ideal and actual similarity
matrices are calculated for the K-means
clusterings of the following two data sets.
1
1
0.9
0.9
0.8
0.8
0.7
0.7
0.6
0.6

y
0.5
y

0.5
0.4
0.4
0.3
0.3
0.2
0.2
0.1
0.1
0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 x
x
Corr = 0.9235
Corr = 0.5810

It reflects that the expected result that the clusters found by k-means
in the random data are worse than the clusters found by k-means in 111
data with well-separated clusters.
 Using Similarity Matrix for Cluster
Validation
• Order the similarity matrix with respect to
cluster labels and inspect visually.
1
1
10 0.9
0.9
20 0.8
0.8
30 0.7
0.7
40 0.6
0.6

Points
50 0.5
y

0.5
60 0.4
0.4
70 0.3
0.3
80 0.2
0.2
90 0.1
0.1
100 0
0 20 40 60 80 100 Sim
ilarity
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
Points
x

112
 Using Similarity Matrix for Cluster
Validation
• Clusters in random data are not so crisp
1 1

10 0.9 0.9

20 0.8 0.8

30 0.7 0.7

40 0.6 0.6
Points

50

y
0.5 0.5

60 0.4 0.4

70 0.3 0.3

80 0.2 0.2

90 0.1 0.1

100 0 0
20 40 60 80 100 Sim
ilarity 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
Points x

DBSCAN

113
 Using Similarity Matrix for Cluster
Validation
• Clusters in random data are not so crisp 1
1

10 0.9 0.9

20 0.8 0.8

30 0.7 0.7

40 0.6 0.6
Points

50

y
0.5 0.5

60 0.4 0.4

70 0.3 0.3

80 0.2 0.2

90 0.1 0.1

100 0 0
20 40 60 80 100 Sim
ilarity 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
Points x

K-means

114
 Using Similarity Matrix for Cluster
Validation
• Clusters in random data are not so crisp
1 1

10 0.9 0.9

20 0.8 0.8

30 0.7 0.7

40 0.6 0.6
Points

50

y
0.5 0.5

60 0.4 0.4

70 0.3 0.3

80 0.2 0.2

90 0.1 0.1

100 0 0
20 40 60 80 100 Sim
ilarity 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
Points x

Complete Link

115
Using Similarity Matrix for Cluster
Validation
1

0.9
1 500
2 0.8
6
0.7
1000
3 0.6
4
1500 0.5

0.4
2000
0.3
5
0.2
2500
0.1
7
3000 0
500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000

DBSCAN

116
 Internal Measures: SSE
• Clusters in more complicated figures aren’t well
separated
• Internal Index: Used to measure the goodness of a
clustering structure without respect to external
information
– SSE
• SSE is good for comparing two clusterings or two
10

clusters (average SSE).

9

• Can also be used to estimate the number of clusters

6
6

SSE
4 5
4
2
3
0 2

1
-2
0
2 5 10 15 20 25 30
-4
K
117
-6
5 10 15
 Internal Measures: SSE
• SSE curve for a more complicated data
set
1
2 6

3
4

SSE of clusters found using K-means

118
 Framework for Cluster Validity
• Need a framework to interpret any measure.
– For example, if our measure of evaluation has the value, 10, is that
good, fair, or poor?
• Statistics provide a framework for cluster validity
– The more “atypical” a clustering result is, the more likely it represents
valid structure in the data
– Can compare the values of an index that result from random data or
clusterings to those of a clustering result.
• If the value of the index is unlikely, then the cluster results are valid
– These approaches are more complicated and harder to understand.
• For comparing the results of two different sets of
cluster analyses, a framework is less necessary.
– However, there is the question of whether the difference between two
index values is significant

119
 Statistical Framework for SSE
• Example
– Compare SSE of 0.005 against three clusters in
random data
– Histogram shows SSE of three clusters in 500 sets of
random data points of size 100 distributed over the
range 0.2 – 0.8 for x and y values
1
50
0.9
45
0.8
40
0.7
35
0.6
Count 30
y

0.5
25
0.4
20
0.3
15
0.2
10
0.1
5
0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0
0.016 0.018 0.02 0.022 0.024 0.026 0.028 0.03 0.032 0.034
x SSE
120
Statistical Framework for Correlation
• Correlation of incidence and proximity matrices
for the K-means clusterings of the following
two data sets.
1 1

0.9 0.9

0.8 0.8

0.7 0.7

0.6 0.6
y

0.5
y

0.5

0.4 0.4

0.3 0.3

0.2 0.2

0.1 0.1

0 0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
x x

Corr = -0.9235 Corr = -0.5810

121
 Internal Measures: Cohesion and
Separation
• Cluster Cohesion: Measures how closely related
are objects in a cluster
– Example: SSE
• Cluster Separation: Measure how distinct or well-
separated a cluster is from other clusters
• Example: Squared Error
– Cohesion is measured by the within cluster sum of squares (SSE)

– Separation is measured by the between cluster sum of squares

BSS = ∑ Ci ( m − mi ) 2 WSS = ∑ ∑ ( x − mi )2
– Where |Ci| iis the size of cluster i i x∈C i
122
 Internal Measures: Cohesion and
Separation
• Example: SSE
– BSS + WSS =
constant m
× × ×
1 m1 2 3 4 m2 5

K=1 cluster: WSS= (1 − 3) 2 + ( 2 − 3) 2 + ( 4 − 3) 2 + (5 − 3) 2 = 10

BSS= 4 × (3 − 3) 2 = 0
Total = 10 + 0 = 10

K=2 clusters: WSS = (1 − 1.5) 2 + ( 2 −1.5) 2 + ( 4 − 4.5) 2 + (5 − 4.5) 2 = 1

BSS = 2 × (3 −1.5) 2 + 2 × ( 4.5 − 3) 2 = 9
Total = 1 + 9 = 10
123
 Internal Measures: Cohesion and
• A proximity graphSeparation
based approach can also be used
for cohesion and separation.
– Cluster cohesion is the sum of the weight of all links within a
cluster.
– Cluster separation is the sum of the weights between nodes in the
cluster and nodes outside the cluster.

cohesion separation

124
 Internal Measures: Silhouette
• Coefficient
Silhouette Coefficient combine ideas of both cohesion and
separation, but for individual points, as well as clusters and
clusterings
• For an individual point, i
– Calculate a = average distance of i to the points in its cluster
– Calculate b = min (average distance of i to points in another cluster)
– The silhouette coefficient for a point is then given by

s = 1 – a/b if a < b, (or s = b/a - 1 if a ≥ b, not the usual case)

b
a
– Typically between 0 and 1.
– The closer to 1 the better.

• Can calculate the Average Silhouette width for a cluster or a

clustering
125
External Measures of Cluster Validity:
Entropy and Purity

126
 Final Comment on Cluster Validity
“The validation of clustering structures is
the most difficult and frustrating part of
cluster analysis.
Without a strong effort in this direction,
cluster analysis will remain a black art
accessible only to those true believers who
have experience and great courage.”

Algorithms for Clustering Data, Jain and

Dubes
127