What do you mean by self similarity?  Power law size scaling?  Or that two 
successive clusterings get nearly the same answer?

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 8, 2012, at 8:40 PM, Lance Norskog <[email protected]> wrote:

> Are there any measures of self-similarity?
> 
> On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 6:07 PM, Ted Dunning <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> I can't comment on the existing evaluators, but for me the only real
>> measure that I care about is average distance to nearest cluster for new or
>> held-out data.  I will be building something of this sort for the
>> clustering part of the knn code I have been working on.
>> 
>> 
>> On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 5:44 PM, Pat Ferrel <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>>> To use something like kmeans on any large and changing data set it seems
>>> a requirement that there be some means of evaluating the quality of
>>> clusters at different scales. The usual eyeballing breaks down quickly.
>>> 
>>> Trying to use the cluster evaluators in Mahout with kmeans as the
>>> clustering method and cosine and the distance measure has proven
>>> problematic. The method is to iterate through the data using different ks
>>> and performing the evaluation at each point. What I find is that certain
>>> values are almost always in error. The Intra-cluster density from
>>> ClusterEvaluator is almost always NaN. The CDbw  inter-cluster density is
>>> almost always 0. I have also seen several cases where CDbw fails to return
>>> any results but have not tracked down why yet.
>>> 
>>> Given that the data for either evaluator is usually incomplete these
>>> methods are not very useful. Is mahout dropping the evaluators? Is the
>>> general wisdom that they are not particularly useful? Should a newer method
>>> be pursued? This seems a fairly important question to me, am I missing
>>> something?
>>> 
>>> Raw data for a sample crawl is given below:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Lance Norskog
> [email protected]

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