A Study on Optimizing the Number of Clusters using External Cluster Relationship Criterion

Abstract

The k-means has been one of the popular, simple and faster clustering algorithms, but the right value of k is unknown. The value of k (the number of clusters) is a very important element because the result of clustering is different depending on it. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm based on an external cluster relationship criterion which is an evaluation metric of clustering result to determine the number of clusters dynamically. Experimental results show that our algorithm is superior to other methods in terms of the accuracy of the number of clusters.