New efficient clustering quality indexes

International audienceThis paper deals with a major challenge in clustering that is optimal model selection. It presents new efficient clustering quality indexes relying on feature maximization, which is an alternative measure to usual distributional measures relying on entropy, Chi-square metric or vector-based measures such as Euclidean distance or correlation distance. First Experiments compare the behavior of these new indexes with usual cluster quality indexes based on Euclidean distance on different kinds of test datasets for which ground truth is available. This comparison clearly highlights altogether the superior accuracy and stability of the new method on these datasets, its efficiency from low to high dimensional range and its tolerance to noise. Further experiments are then conducted on " real life " textual data extracted from a multisource bibliographic database for which ground truth is unknown. These experiments show that the accuracy and stability of these new indexes allow to deal efficiently with diachronic analysis, when other indexes do not fit the requirements for this task