{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,1,14]],"date-time":"2026-01-14T01:41:19Z","timestamp":1768354879966,"version":"3.49.0"},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)","issue":"01","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2019,7,17]],"date-time":"2019-07-17T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1563321600000},"content-version":"unspecified","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/www.aaai.org"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["AAAI"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Typically clustering algorithms provide clustering solutions with prespecified number of clusters. The lack of a priori knowledge on the true number of underlying clusters in the dataset makes it important to have a metric to compare the clustering solutions with different number of clusters. This article quantifies a notion of persistence of clustering solutions that enables comparing solutions with different number of clusters. The persistence relates to the range of dataresolution scales over which a clustering solution persists; it is quantified in terms of the maximum over two-norms of all the associated cluster-covariance matrices. Thus we associate a persistence value for each element in a set of clustering solutions with different number of clusters. We show that the datasets where natural clusters are a priori known, the clustering solutions that identify the natural clusters are most persistent - in this way, this notion can be used to identify solutions with true number of clusters. Detailed experiments on a variety of standard and synthetic datasets demonstrate that the proposed persistence-based indicator outperforms the existing approaches, such as, gap-statistic method, X-means, Gmeans, PG-means, dip-means algorithms and informationtheoretic method, in accurately identifying the clustering solutions with true number of clusters. Interestingly, our method can be explained in terms of the phase-transition phenomenon in the deterministic annealing algorithm, where the number of distinct cluster centers changes (bifurcates) with respect to an annealing parameter.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1609\/aaai.v33i01.33015000","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2019,9,1]],"date-time":"2019-09-01T07:35:11Z","timestamp":1567323311000},"page":"5000-5007","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":4,"title":["On the Persistence of Clustering Solutions and True Number of Clusters in a Dataset"],"prefix":"10.1609","volume":"33","author":[{"given":"Amber","family":"Srivastava","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Mayank","family":"Baranwal","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Srinivasa","family":"Salapaka","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"9382","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2019,7,17]]},"container-title":["Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence"],"original-title":[],"link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/download\/4431\/4309","content-type":"application\/pdf","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/download\/4431\/4309","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2022,11,7]],"date-time":"2022-11-07T06:51:57Z","timestamp":1667803917000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/view\/4431"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2019,7,17]]},"references-count":0,"journal-issue":{"issue":"01","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2019,7,23]]}},"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1609\/aaai.v33i01.33015000","relation":{},"ISSN":["2374-3468","2159-5399"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2374-3468","type":"electronic"},{"value":"2159-5399","type":"print"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2019,7,17]]}}}