Conceptual Meaning of Clusters

Abstract

The interpretation of cluster analysis solutions in the case of objectattribute data can be supported by methods of Formal Concept Analysis leading to a conceptual understanding of the meaning of clusters, partitions and dendrograms. The central idea is the embedding of a given cluster in a conceptual scale which represents the users granularity with respect to the values of attributes in the original data. This method is demonstrated using data from ALLBUS 1996.