Comprehensive cross-hierarchy cluster agreement evaluation
David Johnson, Caiming Xiong, Jing Gao, Jason J. Corso · 2013
Hierarchical clustering represents a family of widely used clustering approaches that can organize objects into a hierar-chy based on the similarity in objects ’ feature values. One sig-nificant 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 se-mantic structure). The existing internal techniques may have strong hierarchical validity, but the available external mea-sures were not developed specifically for hierarchies. This lack of specificity prevents them from comparing hierarchy structures in a holistic, principled way. To address this prob-lem, we propose the Hierarchy Agreement Index, a novel hi-