Optimal combination of nested clusters by a greedy approximation algorithm.

Dang, Edward K F; Luk, Robert W P; Lee, D L; Ho, K S; Chan, Stephen C F · IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell · 2009

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Abstract

Given a set of clusters, we consider an optimization problem which seeks a subset of clusters that maximizes the microaverage F-measure. This optimal value can be used as an evaluation measure of the goodness of clustering. For arbitrarily overlapping clusters, finding the optimal value is NP-hard. We claim that a greedy approximation algorithm yields the global optimal solution for clusters that overlap only by nesting. We present a mathematical proof of this claim by induction. For a family of n clusters containing a total of N objects, this algorithm has an {\rm O}(n;{2}) time complexity and O(N) space complexity.

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