2010/06/02 by Joachim M. Buhmann, Buhmann, Joachim M.
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Clustering Algorithms Research #Bayesian Methods and Mixture Models #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Theory (cs.IT) #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning (stat.ML)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1006.0375
openalex publication_date 2010/06/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Model selection in clustering requires (i) to specify a suitable clustering principle and (ii) to control the model order complexity by choosing an appropriate number of clusters depending on the noise level in the data. We advocate an information theoretic perspective where the uncertainty in the measurements quantizes the set of data partitionings and, thereby, induces uncertainty in the solution space of clusterings. A clustering model, which can tolerate a higher level of fluctuations in the measurements than alternative models, is considered to be superior provided that the clustering solution is equally informative. This tradeoff between informativeness and robustness is used as a model selection criterion. The requirement that data partitionings should generalize from one data set to an equally probable second data set gives rise to a new notion of structure induced information.