Bootstrap technique in cluster analysis

摘要

We define a method to estimate the number of clusters in a data set E, using the bootstrap technique. This approach involves the generation of several “fake” data sets by sampling patterns with replacement in E (bootstrapping). For each number, K, of clusters, a measure of stability of the K-cluster partitions over the bootstrap samples is used to characterize the significance of the K-cluster partition for the original data set. The value of K which provides the most stable partitions is the estimate of the number of clusters in E. The performance of this new technique is demonstrated on both synthetic and real data, and is applied to the segmentation of range images.