Understanding and enhancement of internal clustering validation indexes for categorical data (Q1712024)

Summary: Clustering is one of the main tasks of machine learning. Internal clustering validation indexes (CVIs) are used to measure the quality of several clustered partitions to determine the local optimal clustering results in an unsupervised manner, and can act as the objective function of clustering algorithms. In this paper, we first studied several well-known internal CVIs for categorical data clustering, and proved the ineffectiveness of evaluating the partitions of different numbers of clusters without any inter-cluster separation measures or assumptions; the accurateness of separation, along with its coordination with the intra-cluster compactness measures, can notably affect performance. Then, aiming to enhance the internal clustering validation measurement, we proposed a new internal CVI -- clustering utility based on the averaged information gain of isolating each cluster (\textit{CUBAGE}) -- which measures both the compactness and the separation of the partition. The experimental results supported our findings with regard to the existing internal CVIs, and showed that the proposed \textit{CUBAGE} outperforms other internal CVIs with or without a pre-known number of clusters.