A new index based on sparsity measures for comparing fuzzy partitions

Abstract

This article adresses the problem of assessing how close two strict and/or fuzzy partitions are. A new index based on a measurement of the sparsity of the contingency matrix crossing the partitions is proposed that satisfies the required properties formulated within the paper and presents a low complexity. It is compared to well-known existing indices of the literature, such as the Rand and the Jaccard indices, the transfert distance and some of their recent fuzzy counterparts. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.