A Meta-learning approach for recommending the number of clusters for clustering algorithms

摘要

One of the main challenges in Clustering Analysis is choosing the optimal number of clusters. A typical methodology is to evaluate a validity index over the data and to optimize it as a function of the number of clusters. However, this process can have a high computational cost. In this work, we introduce a new approach for recommending the number of clusters for a particular dataset by using Meta-learning. As the predictive performance of the meta-models induced by Meta-learning is affected by how datasets are described by meta-features, we propose a new set of meta-features able to improve the predictive performance of meta-models used for recommending the number of clusters. Experimental results show that the proposed approach provides a good recommendation of the number of clusters. Additionally, the proposed meta-feature obtains better results than meta-features for clustering tasks found in the literature.