Normality-based validation for crisp clustering

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Pattern Recognition. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Pattern Recognition, 43, 36, (2010) DOI 10.1016/j.patcog.2009.09.018We introduce a new validity index for crisp clustering that is based on the average normality of the clusters. Unlike methods based on inter-cluster and intra-cluster distances, this index emphasizes the cluster shape by using a high order characterization of its probability distribution. The normality of a cluster is characterized by its negentropy, a standard measure of the distance to normality which evaluates the difference between the cluster's entropy and the entropy of a normal distribution with the same covariance matrix. The definition of the negentropy involves the distribution's differential entropy. However, we show that it is possible to avoid its explicit computation by considering only negentropy increments with respect to the initial data distribution, where all the points are assumed to belong to the same cluster. The resulting negentropy increment validity index only requires the computation of covariance matrices. We have applied the new index to an extensive set of artificial and real problems where it provides, in general, better results than other indices, both with respect to the prediction of the correct number of clusters and to the similarity among the real clusters and those inferred.This work has been partially supported with funds from MEC BFU2006-07902/BFI, CAM S-SEM-0255-2006 and CAM/UAM CCG08-UAM/TIC-442

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Traballo fin de grao (UDC.DER). Dereito. Curso 2013/201