Experimental Comparison of Cluster Ensemble Methods

Cluster ensembles are deemed to be a robust and accurate alternative to single clustering runs. 24 methods for designing cluster ensembles are compared here using 24 data sets, both artificial and real. Adjusted rand index and classification accuracy are used as accuracy criteria with respect to a known partition assumed to be the "true" one. The data sets are randomly chosen to represent medium-size problems arising within a variety of biomedical domains. Ensemble size of 10 was considered. It was found that there is a significant difference among the compared methods (Friedman's two way ANOVA). The best ensembles were based on k-means individual clusterers. Consensus functions interpreting the consensus matrix of the ensemble as data, rather than similarity, were found to be significantly better than the traditional alternatives, including CSPA and HGPA