Determining the Quality of a Dataset in Clustering Terms

Abstract

The purpose of the theoretical considerations and research conducted was to indicate the instruments with which the quality of a dataset can be verified for the segmentation of observations occurring in the dataset. The paper proposes a novel way to deal with mixed datasets containing categorical and continuous attributes in a customer segmentation task. The categorical variables were embedded using an innovative unsupervised model based on an autoencoder. The customers were then divided into groups using different clustering algorithms, based on similarity matrices. In addition to the classic k-means method and the more modern DBSCAN, three graph algorithms were used: the Louvain algorithm, the greedy algorithm and the label propagation algorithm. The research was conducted on two datasets: one containing on retail customers and the other containing wholesale customers. The Calinski–Harabasz index, Davies–Bouldins index, NMI index, Fowlkes–Mallows index and silhouette score were used to assess the quality of the clustering. It was noted that the modularity parameter for graph methods was a good indicator of whether a given set could be meaningfully divided into groups.