Back to the 2024 paper

Module 4: Cluster Analysis

20242m

Which measure is typically used to assess the quality of clusters in K-means clustering?

(i) Silhouette coefficient
(ii) Precision
(iii) Accuracy
(iv) F1 score

Worked SolutionAI Assisted

Answer: (i) Silhouette coefficient

The silhouette coefficient is the standard internal quality measure for clusters. For a point ii, s(i)=b(i)−a(i)max⁡{a(i), b(i)}s(i) = \dfrac{b(i) - a(i)}{\max\{a(i),\,b(i)\}}, where a(i)a(i) is the average distance to points in its own cluster and b(i)b(i) is the average distance to points in the nearest neighbouring cluster. Values lie between −1-1 and 11; a value near 11 means the point is well matched to its own cluster and far from every other cluster. Averaging s(i)s(i) over all points — or repeating this for several values of kk and choosing the best average — is a common way to assess and tune K-means.

Precision, accuracy and F1 score are label-based classification metrics: they need ground-truth classes to compare against. Clustering is unsupervised and has no ground-truth labels, so (ii), (iii) and (iv) do not apply.

Similar questions

Free AppAndroid App

Coursify Android App

Generate AI courses, take quick quizzes between classes, and master complex engineering concepts on the go.