Enrichment Procedures for Soft Clusters: A Statistical Test and its Applications

Phillips, Rhonda D. and Watson, Layne T. and Wynne, Randolph H. and Ramakrishnan, Naren (2010) Enrichment Procedures for Soft Clusters: A Statistical Test and its Applications. Technical Report TR-10-02, Computer Science, Virginia Tech.

Abstract

Clusters, typically mined by modeling locality of attribute spaces, are often evaluated for their ability to demonstrate ‘enrichment’ of categorical features. A cluster enrichment procedure evaluates the membership of a cluster for significant representation in pre-defined categories of interest. While classical enrichment procedures assume a hard clustering definition, in this paper we introduce a new statistical test that computes enrichments for soft clusters. We demonstrate an application of this test in refining and evaluating soft clusters for classification of remotely sensed images.