A buffering strategy to avoid ordering effects in clustering

Abstract

It is widely reported in the literature that incremental clustering systems suffer from instance ordering effects and that under some orderings, extremely poor clusterings may be obtained. In this paper we present a new strategy aimed to mitigate these effects, the Not-Yet strategy which has a general and open formulation and it is not coupled to any particular system. Results suggest that the strategy improves the clustering quality and also that performance is limited by its limited foresight. We also show that, when combined with other strategies, the Not-Yet strategy may help the system to get high quality clusterings.