Performance analysis of clustered radio interferometric calibration

Subtraction of compact, bright sources is essential to produce high quality images in radio astronomy. It is recently proposed that `clustered' calibration can perform better in subtracting fainter background sources. This is due to the fact that the effective power of a source cluster is greater than the power of an individual, weak source therefore enabling better calibration. In this paper, we present performance analysis of clustered calibration and show that, indeed, clustered calibration gives better results compared to un-clustered calibration, which is already seen in the previous work. The use of this analysis enables us to choose the optimal number of clusters for a given observation in an efficient way.