PMID- 22870181
OWN - NLM
STAT- MEDLINE
DCOM- 20130117
LR  - 20211021
IS  - 1932-6203 (Electronic)
IS  - 1932-6203 (Linking)
VI  - 7
IP  - 7
DP  - 2012
TI  - A multicriteria decision making approach for estimating the number of clusters in 
      a data set.
PG  - e41713
LID - 10.1371/journal.pone.0041713 [doi]
LID - e41713
AB  - Determining the number of clusters in a data set is an essential yet difficult 
      step in cluster analysis. Since this task involves more than one criterion, it 
      can be modeled as a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. This paper 
      proposes a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM)-based approach to estimate 
      the number of clusters for a given data set. In this approach, MCDM methods 
      consider different numbers of clusters as alternatives and the outputs of any 
      clustering algorithm on validity measures as criteria. The proposed method is 
      examined by an experimental study using three MCDM methods, the well-known 
      clustering algorithm--k-means, ten relative measures, and fifteen public-domain 
      UCI machine learning data sets. The results show that MCDM methods work fairly 
      well in estimating the number of clusters in the data and outperform the ten 
      relative measures considered in the study.
FAU - Peng, Yi
AU  - Peng Y
AD  - School of Management and Economics, University of Electronic Science and 
      Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, China.
FAU - Zhang, Yong
AU  - Zhang Y
FAU - Kou, Gang
AU  - Kou G
FAU - Shi, Yong
AU  - Shi Y
LA  - eng
PT  - Journal Article
PT  - Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
DEP - 20120727
PL  - United States
TA  - PLoS One
JT  - PloS one
JID - 101285081
SB  - IM
MH  - Algorithms
MH  - Artificial Intelligence
MH  - Cluster Analysis
MH  - *Decision Making
PMC - PMC3411440
COIS- Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
EDAT- 2012/08/08 06:00
MHDA- 2013/01/18 06:00
PMCR- 2012/07/27
CRDT- 2012/08/08 06:00
PHST- 2012/04/01 00:00 [received]
PHST- 2012/06/27 00:00 [accepted]
PHST- 2012/08/08 06:00 [entrez]
PHST- 2012/08/08 06:00 [pubmed]
PHST- 2013/01/18 06:00 [medline]
PHST- 2012/07/27 00:00 [pmc-release]
AID - PONE-D-12-09622 [pii]
AID - 10.1371/journal.pone.0041713 [doi]
PST - ppublish
SO  - PLoS One. 2012;7(7):e41713. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0041713. Epub 2012 Jul 27.