You are viewing a plain text version of this content. The canonical link for it is here.
Posted to dev@mahout.apache.org by "Pat Ferrel (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org> on 2012/07/09 20:18:34 UTC

[jira] [Commented] (MAHOUT-1020) The Cluster Evaluator is returning bad results

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MAHOUT-1020?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13409696#comment-13409696 ] 

Pat Ferrel commented on MAHOUT-1020:
------------------------------------

This issue is still a problem even though the build succeeds. Please reopen it. 

I'll associate some data later but a short description is that with most real world data the Intra-cluster density from ClusterEvaluator is almost always NaN. The CDbw  inter-cluster density is almost always 0. I have also seen several cases where CDbw fails to return any results but have not tracked down why yet. 
                
> The Cluster Evaluator is returning bad results
> ----------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: MAHOUT-1020
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MAHOUT-1020
>             Project: Mahout
>          Issue Type: Bug
>          Components: Clustering
>    Affects Versions: 0.6, 0.8
>         Environment: Various environments and data sets. Mahout 0.6, 0.7, 0.8 trunk.
>            Reporter: Pat Ferrel
>            Assignee: Jeff Eastman
>             Fix For: 0.8
>
>
> Conversation with between Pat Ferrel and Jeff Eastman on the user list
> Hi Pat,
> I don't have a good answer here. Evidently, something in CDbw has become broken and you are the first to notice. When I run TestCDbwEvaluator, the values for k-means and fuzzy-k are clearly incorrect. The values for Canopy, MeanShift and Dirichlet are not so obviously incorrect but I remain suspicious. Something must have become broken in the recent clustering refactoring.
> From the method CDbwEvaluator.invalidCluster comment (used to enable pruning):
>    * Return if the cluster is valid. Valid clusters must have more than 2 representative points,
>    * and at least one of them must be different than the cluster center. This is because the
>    * representative points extraction will duplicate the cluster center if it is empty.
> Oddly enough, inspection of the test log indicates that only k-means and fuzzy-k are not pruning clusters. Clearly some more investigation is needed. I will take a look at it tomorrow. In the mean time if you develop any additional insight please do share it with us.
> Thanks,
> Jeff
> On 5/17/12 3:53 PM, Pat Ferrel wrote:
> > I built a tool that iterates through a list of values for k on the same data and spits out the CDbw and ClusterEvaluator results each time.
> >
> > When the evaluator or CDbw prunes a cluster, how do I interpret that? They seem to throw out the same clusters on a given run. Also CDbw always returns an inter-cluster density of 0?

--
This message is automatically generated by JIRA.
If you think it was sent incorrectly, please contact your JIRA administrators: https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/ContactAdministrators!default.jspa
For more information on JIRA, see: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira