Heuristics for minimizing the maximum within-clusters distance

The clustering problem consists in finding patterns in a data set in order to divide it into clusters with high within-cluster similarity. This paper presents the study of a problem, here called MMD problem, which aims at finding a clustering with a predefined number of clusters that minimizes the l...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: José Augusto Fioruci, Franklina M.B. Toledo, Mariá Cristina V. Nascimento
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Sociedade Brasileira de Pesquisa Operacional 2012-12-01
Series:Pesquisa Operacional
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0101-74382012000300002
Description
Summary:The clustering problem consists in finding patterns in a data set in order to divide it into clusters with high within-cluster similarity. This paper presents the study of a problem, here called MMD problem, which aims at finding a clustering with a predefined number of clusters that minimizes the largest within-cluster distance (diameter) among all clusters. There are two main objectives in this paper: to propose heuristics for the MMD and to evaluate the suitability of the best proposed heuristic results according to the real classification of some data sets. Regarding the first objective, the results obtained in the experiments indicate a good performance of the best proposed heuristic that outperformed the Complete Linkage algorithm (the most used method from the literature for this problem). Nevertheless, regarding the suitability of the results according to the real classification of the data sets, the proposed heuristic achieved better quality results than C-Means algorithm, but worse than Complete Linkage.
ISSN:0101-7438
1678-5142