With the aim to propose a non parametric hypothesis test, this paper carries out a study on the Matching Error (ME), a comparison index of two partitions obtained from the same data set, using for example two clustering methods. This index is related to the misclassifica-tion error in supervised learning. Some properties of the ME and, especially, its distribution function for the case of two independent partitions are analyzed. Extensive simulations show the efficiency of the ME and we propose a hypothesis test based on it.
We address the problem of robust clustering by combining data partitions (forming a clustering ensemble) produced by multiple clusterings. We formulate robust clustering under an information-theoretical framework; mutual information is the underlying concept used in the definition of quantitative measures of agreement or consistency between data partitions. Robustness is assessed by variance of the cluster membership, based on bootstrapping. We propose and analyze a voting mechanism on pairwise associations of patterns for combining data partitions. We show that the proposed technique attempts to optimize the mutual information based criteria, although the optimality is not ensured in all situations. This evidence accumulation method is demonstrated by combining the well-known K-means algorithm to produce clustering ensembles. Experimental results show the ability of the technique to identify clusters with arbitrary shapes and sizes. This paper proposes an information theoretic criterion for comparing two partitions, or clusterings, of the same data set. The criterion, called variation of information (VI), measures the amount of information lost and gained in changing from clustering ( C ) to clustering ( C ' ). The criterion makes no assumptions about how the clusterings were generated and applies to both soft and hard clusterings. The basic properties of VI are presented and discussed from the point of view of comparing clusterings. In particular, the VI is positive, symmetric and obeys the triangle inequality. Thus, surprisingly enough, it is a true metric on the space of clusterings. This paper introduces the problem of combining multiple partitionings of a set of objects into a single consolidated clustering without accessing the features or algorithms that determined these partitionings. We first identify several application scenarios for the resultant 'knowledge reuse' framework that we call cluster ensembles. The cluster ensemble problem is then formalized as a combinatorial optimization problem in terms of shared mutual information. In addition to a direct maximization approach, we propose three effective and efficient techniques for obtaining high-quality combiners (consensus functions). The first combiner induces a similarity measure from the partitionings and then reclusters the objects. The second combiner is based on hypergraph partitioning. The third one collapses groups of clusters into meta-clusters which then compete for each object to determine the combined clustering. Due to the low computational costs of our techniques, it is quite feasible to use a supra-consensus function that evaluates all three approaches against the objective function and picks the best solution for a given situation. We evaluate the effectiveness of cluster ensembles in three qualitatively different application scenarios: (i) where the original clusters were formed based on non-identical sets of features, (ii) where the original clustering algorithms worked on non-identical sets of objects, and (iii) where a common data-set is used and the main purpose of combining multiple clusterings is to improve the quality and robustness of the solution. Promising results are obtained in all three situations for synthetic as well as real data-sets.