Best K: Critical Clustering Structures in Categorical Datasets

The demand on cluster analysis for categorical data continues to grow over the last decade. A well-known problem in categorical clustering is to determine the best K number of clusters. Although several categorical clustering algorithms have been developed, surprisingly, none has satisfactorily addressed the problem of Best K for categorical clustering. Since categorical data does not have an inherent distance function as the similarity measure, traditional cluster validation techniques based on geometric shapes and density distributions are not appropriate for categorical data.