On the relative hardness of clustering corpora

Abstract

Clustering is often considered the most important unsupervised learning problem and several clustering algorithms have been proposed over the years. Many of these algorithms have been tested on classical clustering corpora such as Reuters and 20 Newsgroups in order to determine their quality. However, up to now the relative hardness of those corpora has not been determined. The relative clustering hardness of a given corpus may be of high interest, since it would help to determine whether the usual corpora used to benchmark the clustering algorithms are hard enough. Moreover, if it is possible to find a set of features involved in the hardness of the clustering task itself, specific clustering techniques may be used instead of general ones in order to improve the quality of the obtained clusters. In this paper, we are presenting a study of the specific feature of the vocabulary overlapping among documents of a given corpus. Our preliminary experiments were carried out on three different corpora: the train and test version of the R8 subset of the Reuters collection and a reduced version of the 20 Newsgroups (Mini20Newsgroups). We figured out that a possible relation between the vocabulary overlapping and the F-Measure may be introduced. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.