Level of Sustainable Development in Poland and EU Countries – Analysis with Cluster Stability Measures

Abstract

In the context of taxonomy methods in recent years, a lot of attention is paid to the stability of these methods, i.e. the answer to the question to what extent the structure discovered by a given method is actually present in the data? Many different ways of measuring stability have been proposed in the literature, which are mainly relating to the stability of the final grouping result. Lord et al. (2017) instead proposed a measure of stability for each observation from the data set and the measure of stability for individual groups. In their article, they suggest that an individual measure of stability may indicate noisy observation whereas the stability measure relating to particular groups may indicate clusters of noise which should be removed from the dataset. The aim of the paper is to apply the proposed individual measure of stability and a measure of stability for individual groups to answer the question to what extent Poland is matched the EU in terms of the level of sustainable development.