Empirical Comparisons of Clustering Algorithms using Silhouette Information

Many clustering algorithms have been used in diverse fields. When we need to group given data set into clusters, many clustering algorithms based on similarity or distance measures are considered. Most clustering works have been based on hierarchical and non-hierarchical clustering algorithms. Generally, for the clustering works, researchers have used clustering algorithms case by case from these algorithms. Also they have to determine proper clustering methods subjectively by their prior knowledge. In this paper, to solve the subjective problem of clustering we make empirical comparisons of popular clustering algorithms which are hierarchical and non hierarchical techniques using Silhouette measure. We use silhouette information to evaluate the clustering results such as the number of clusters and cluster variance. We verify our comparison study by experimental results using data sets from UCI machine learning repository. Therefore we are able to use efficient and objective clustering algorithms.