Comprehensive cross-hierarchy cluster agreement evaluation

David M. Johnson, Caiming Xiong, Jing Gao, Jason J. Corso

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Hierarchical clustering represents a family of widely used clustering approaches that can organize objects into a hierarchy based on the similarity in objects' feature values. One significant obstacle facing hierarchical clustering research today is the lack of general and robust evaluation methods. Existing works rely on a range of evaluation techniques including both internal (no ground-truth is considered in evaluation) and external measures (results are compared to ground-truth semantic structure). The existing internal techniques may have strong hierarchical validity, but the available external measures were not developed specifically for hierarchies. This lack of specificity prevents them from comparing hierarchy structures in a holistic, principled way. To address this problem, we propose the Hierarchy Agreement Index, a novel hierarchy comparison algorithm that holistically compares two hierarchical clustering results (e.g. ground-truth and automatically learned hierarchies) and rates their structural agreement on a 0-1 scale. We compare the proposed evaluation method with a baseline approach (based on computing F-Score results between individual nodes in the two hierarchies) on a set of unsupervised and semi-supervised hierarchical clustering results, and observe that the proposed Hierarchy Agreement Index provides more intuitive and reasonable evaluation of the learned hierarchies.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLate-Breaking Developments in the Field of Artificial Intelligence - Papers Presented at the 27th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Technical Report
Pages56-58
Number of pages3
StatePublished - 2013
Event27th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2013 - Bellevue, WA, United States
Duration: 14 Jul 201318 Jul 2013

Publication series

NameAAAI Workshop - Technical Report
VolumeWS-13-17

Conference

Conference27th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2013
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBellevue, WA
Period14/07/1318/07/13

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