Categories &

Functions List

Class Definition: SilhouetteEvaluation

statistics: SilhouetteEvaluation

Silhouette evaluation for clustering

The SilhouetteEvaluation class implements an object to evaluate clustering solutions using the silhouette criterion. A SilhouetteEvaluation object is a ClusterCriterion object that computes silhouette values for clustering solutions and selects the best number of clusters as the one with the highest average silhouette value.

Create a SilhouetteEvaluation object by using the evalclusters function or the class constructor.

List of public properties specific to SilhouetteEvaluation:

Distance

A valid distance metric name (string), a function handle, or a numeric vector as returned by pdist. This specifies how pairwise distances are computed.

ClusterPriors

A character vector specifying how to evaluate silhouette values across clusters: "empirical" (default) uses empirical cluster priors, or "equal" treats clusters equally.

ClusterSilhouettes

A cell array containing silhouette values for each observation for each inspected cluster number.

The best clustering solution according to the silhouette criterion is the one that yields the highest average silhouette value.

See also: evalclusters, ClusterCriterion, CalinskiHarabaszEvaluation, DaviesBouldinEvaluation, GapEvaluation

Source Code: SilhouetteEvaluation

Properties

A string naming a distance metric, a function handle that computes distances, or a numeric vector as produced by pdist. This property is read-only.

Specifies how cluster-level silhouette aggregation is computed. Valid values are "empirical" (default) and "equal". This property is read-only.

A cell array where each element contains the silhouette values for the observations of a given clustering (corresponding to an inspected K). This property is read-only.

Methods

SilhouetteEvaluation: obj = addK (obj, K)

SilhouetteEvaluation: plot (obj)
SilhouetteEvaluation: h = plot (obj)

Plot the criterion values (average silhouette) against inspected cluster numbers (InspectedK) for the given obj. Optionally returns the axis handle for the plot.

SilhouetteEvaluation: obj = compact (obj)