A wide range of abstract characteristics of partitions have been proposed for cluster evaluation. We empirically evaluated the performance of these metrics for flow cytometry data and found that the set-matching metrics perform closest to human. 1

Despite the ubiquity of clustering as a tool in unsupervised learning, there is not yet a consensus on a formal theory, and the vast majority of work in this direction has focused on unsupervised clustering. We study a recently proposed framework for supervised clustering where there is access to a teacher. We give an improved generic algorithm to cluster any concept class in that model. Our algorithm is query-efficient in the sense that it involves only a small amount of interaction with the teacher. We also present and study two natural generalizations of the model. The model assumes that the teacher response to the algorithm is perfect. We eliminate this limitation by proposing a noisy model and give an algorithm for clustering the class of intervals in this noisy model. We also propose a dynamic model where the teacher sees a random subset of the points. Finally, for datasets satisfying a spectrum of weak to strong properties, we give query bounds, and show that a class of clustering functions containing Single-Linkage will find the target clustering under the strongest property. 1

The large volume principle proposed by Vladimir Vapnik, which advocates that hypotheses lying in an equivalence class with a larger volume are more preferable, is a useful alternative to the large margin principle. In this paper, we introduce a clustering model based on the large volume principle called maximum volume clustering (MVC), and propose two algorithms to solve it approximately: a soft-label and a hard-label MVC algorithms based on sequential quadratic programming and semi-definite programming, respectively. Our MVC model includes spectral clustering and maximum margin clustering as special cases, and is substantially more general. We also establish the finite sample stability and an error bound for soft-label MVC method. Experiments show that the proposed MVC approach compares favorably with state-of-the-art clustering algorithms. 1

Divergence from a random baseline is a technique for the evaluation of document clustering. It ensures cluster quality measures are performing work that prevents ineffective clusterings from giving high scores to clusterings that provide no useful result. These concepts are defined and analysed using intrinsic and extrinsic approaches to the evaluation of document cluster quality. This includes the classical clusters to categories approach and a novel approach that uses ad hoc information retrieval. The divergence from a random baseline approach is able to differentiate ineffective clusterings encountered in the INEX XML Mining track. It also appears to perform a normalisation similar to the Normalised Mutual Information (NMI) measure but it can be applied to any measure of cluster quality. When it is applied to the intrinsic measure of distortion as measured by RMSE, subtraction from a random baseline provides a clear optimum that is not apparent otherwise. This approach can be applied to any clustering evaluation. This paper describes its use in the context of document clustering evaluation. 1