Towards Automatic Clustering Analysis using Traces of Information Gain: The InfoGuide Method
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Clustering analysis has become a ubiquitous information retrieval tool in a wide range of domains, but a more automatic framework is still lacking. Though internal metrics are the key players towards a successful retrieval of clusters, their effectiveness on real-world datasets remains not fully understood, mainly because of their unrealistic assumptions underlying datasets. We hypothesized that capturing traces of information gain between increasingly complex clustering retrievals— InfoGuide—enables an automatic clustering analysis with improved clustering retrievals. We validated the InfoGuide hypothesis by capturing the traces of information gain using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic and comparing the clusters retrieved by InfoGuide against those retrieved by other commonly used internal metrics in artificially-generated, benchmarks, and real-world datasets. Our results suggested that InfoGuide can enable a more automatic clustering analysis and may be more suitable for retrieving clusters in real-world datasets displaying nontrivial statistical properties.
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