What are the true clusters?

A constructivist view of reality and science is sketched.Context- and aim-dependent characteristics of clusterings are listed.Formal approaches to define true clusters are presented.Researchers need to communicate their cluster concept transparently.Comparisons should show how different methods are good for different aims. Constructivist philosophy and Hasok Chang's active scientific realism are used to argue that the idea of "truth" in cluster analysis depends on the context and the clustering aims. Different characteristics of clusterings are required in different situations. Researchers should be explicit about on what requirements and what idea of "true clusters" their research is based, because clustering becomes scientific not through uniqueness but through transparent and open communication. The idea of "natural kinds" is a human construct, but it highlights the human experience that the reality outside the observer's control seems to make certain distinctions between categories inevitable. Various desirable characteristics of clusterings and various approaches to define a context-dependent truth are listed, and I discuss what impact these ideas can have on the comparison of clustering methods, and the choice of a clustering methods and related decisions in practice.

• Publication year

  2015

• Venue

  Pattern Recognition Letters

• Publication date

  2015-02-09

• Fields of study

  Mathematics, Philosophy, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.patrec.2015.04.009arXiv 1502.02555
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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