Using cluster validation criterion to identify optimal feature subset and cluster number for document clustering [An article from: Information Processing and Management]

This digital document is a journal article from Information Processing and Management, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
This paper presents a cluster validation based document clustering algorithm, which is capable of identifying an important feature subset and the intrinsic value of model order (cluster number). The important feature subset is selected by optimizing a cluster validity criterion subject to some constraint. For achieving model order identification capability, this feature selection procedure is conducted for each possible value of cluster number. The feature subset and the cluster number which maximize the cluster validity criterion are chosen as our answer. We have evaluated our algorithm using several datasets from the 20Newsgroup corpus. Experimental results show that our algorithm can find the important feature subset, estimate the cluster number and achieve higher micro-averaged precision than previous document clustering algorithms which require the value of cluster number to be provided.