{"title":"Clustering methods: To optimize or to not optimize?","authors":"Michael Brusco,Douglas Steinley,Ashley L Watts","doi":"10.1037/met0000688","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Many clustering problems are associated with a particular objective criterion that is sought to be optimized. There are often several methods that can be used to tackle the optimization problem, and one or more of them might guarantee a globally optimal solution. However, it is quite possible that, relative to one or more suboptimal solutions, a globally optimal solution might be less interpretable from the standpoint of psychological theory or be less in accordance with some known (i.e., true) cluster structure. For example, in simulation experiments, it has sometimes been observed that there is not a perfect correspondence between the optimized clustering criterion and recovery of the underlying known cluster structure. This can lead to the misconception that clustering methods with a tendency to produce suboptimal solutions might, in some instances, be preferable to superior methods that provide globally optimal (or at least better locally optimal) solutions. In this article, we present results from simulation studies in the context of K-median clustering where departure from global optimality was carefully controlled. Although the results showed that suboptimal solutions sometimes produced marginally better recovery for experimental cells where the known cluster structure was less well-defined, capriciously accepting inferior solutions is an unwise practice. However, there are instances in which some sacrifice in the optimization criterion value to meet certain desirable constraints or to improve the value of one or more other relevant criteria is principled. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).","PeriodicalId":20782,"journal":{"name":"Psychological methods","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.6000,"publicationDate":"2024-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Psychological methods","FirstCategoryId":"102","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1037/met0000688","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"PSYCHOLOGY, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Many clustering problems are associated with a particular objective criterion that is sought to be optimized. There are often several methods that can be used to tackle the optimization problem, and one or more of them might guarantee a globally optimal solution. However, it is quite possible that, relative to one or more suboptimal solutions, a globally optimal solution might be less interpretable from the standpoint of psychological theory or be less in accordance with some known (i.e., true) cluster structure. For example, in simulation experiments, it has sometimes been observed that there is not a perfect correspondence between the optimized clustering criterion and recovery of the underlying known cluster structure. This can lead to the misconception that clustering methods with a tendency to produce suboptimal solutions might, in some instances, be preferable to superior methods that provide globally optimal (or at least better locally optimal) solutions. In this article, we present results from simulation studies in the context of K-median clustering where departure from global optimality was carefully controlled. Although the results showed that suboptimal solutions sometimes produced marginally better recovery for experimental cells where the known cluster structure was less well-defined, capriciously accepting inferior solutions is an unwise practice. However, there are instances in which some sacrifice in the optimization criterion value to meet certain desirable constraints or to improve the value of one or more other relevant criteria is principled. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
期刊介绍:
Psychological Methods is devoted to the development and dissemination of methods for collecting, analyzing, understanding, and interpreting psychological data. Its purpose is the dissemination of innovations in research design, measurement, methodology, and quantitative and qualitative analysis to the psychological community; its further purpose is to promote effective communication about related substantive and methodological issues. The audience is expected to be diverse and to include those who develop new procedures, those who are responsible for undergraduate and graduate training in design, measurement, and statistics, as well as those who employ those procedures in research.