Background Knowledge Integration in Clustering Using Purity Indexes

International audienceIn recent years, the use of background knowledge to improve the data mining process has been intensively studied. Indeed, background knowledge along with knowledge directly or indirectly provided by the user are often available. However, it is often difficult to formalize this kind of knowledge, as it is often dependent of the domain. In this article, we studied the integration of knowledge as labeled objects in clustering algorithms. Several criteria allowing the evaluation of the purity of a clustering are presented and their behaviours are compared using artificial datasets. Advantages and drawbacks of each criterion are analyzed in order to help the user to make a choice among them