Improved minimum-minimum roughness algorithm for clustering categorical data

Abstract

Clustering is a fundamental technique in data mining and machine learning. Recently, many researchers are interested in the problem of clustering categorical data and several new approaches have been proposed. One of the successful and pioneering clustering algorithms is the Minimum-Minimum Roughness algorithm (MMR) which is a top-down hierarchical clustering algorithm and can handle the uncertainty in clustering categorical data. However, MMR tends to choose the category with less value leaf node with more objects, leading to undesirable clustering results. To overcome such shortcomings, this paper proposes an improved version of the MMR algorithm for clustering categorical data, called IMMR (Improved Minimum-Minimum Roughness). Experimental results on actual data sets taken from UCI show that the IMMR algorithm outperforms MMR in clustering categorical data.