Abstract

Various clustering algorithms have been developed since conventional hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) and partitioning clustering algorithms have their own limitations and scopes of applications. However, in the area of e-nose where clustering is applied, the conventional algorithms (mostly HCA) still play a dominant role. In addition, comparison among different clustering methods or validation of clustering results was seldom mentioned. In this paper, we present a state-of-the-art clustering method – spectral clustering – and compare it with six conventional clustering methods: K-clustering (ISODATA, FCM and k-means) and HCA (single linkage, complete linkage and Ward's). Three external validation criteria – mutual information criteria (MI), precision and rand index (RI) – were used to evaluate clustering performances on three independent e-nose datasets. The spectral clustering outperforms with statistical significance (alpha=0.05) the performance of other methods, and the single linkage presents the worst (unacceptable) clustering result. In addition, the proposed approach – cluster validation criteria in combination with majority voting – in a way makes clustering a semi-supervised classification technique. Using this approach it is possible to compare clustering based semi-supervised methods with classification methods to find which method is better for discrimination of a certain e-nose dataset.

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