An analysis of meta-learning techniques for ranking clustering algorithms applied to artificial data

Abstract

Meta-learning techniques can be very useful for supporting non-expert users in the algorithm selection task. In this work, we investigate the use of different components in an unsupervised meta-learning framework. In such scheme, the system aims to predict, for a new learning task, the ranking of the candidate clustering algorithms according to the knowledge previously acquired. In the context of unsupervised meta-learning techniques, we analyzed two different sets of meta-features, nine different candidate clustering algorithms and two learning methods as meta-learners. Such analysis showed that the system, using MLP and SVR meta-learners, was able to successfully associate the proposed sets of dataset characteristics to the performance of the new candidate algorithms. In fact, a hypothesis test showed that the correlation between the predicted and ideal rankings were significantly higher than the default ranking method. In this sense, we also could validate the use of the proposed sets of meta-features for describing the artificial learning tasks. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.