Performance evaluation of principal component analysis for clustering problems

Clustering analysis is widely used in data mining to classify data into categories on the basis of their similarity. Through the decades, many clustering techniques have been developed, including hierarchical and non-hierarchical algorithms. In gene profiling problems, because of the large number of genes and the complexity of biological networks, dimensionality reduction techniques are critical exploratory tools for clustering analysis of gene expression data. Recently, clustering analysis of applying dimensionality reduction techniques was also proposed. PCA (principal component analysis) is a popular methd of dimensionality reduction techniques for clustering problems. However, previous studies analyzed the performance of PCA for only full data sets. In this paper, to specifically and robustly evaluate the performance of PCA for clustering analysis, we exploit an improved FCBF (fast correlation-based filter) of feature selection methods for supervised clustering data sets, and employ two well-known clustering algorithms: k-means and k-medoids. Computational results from supervised data sets show that the performance of PCA is very poor for large-scale features.