>What does color mean here? What about width of the box? FWIW, I infer color is solely for visual distinction -- rotating through orange, red, yellow, pink from left to right. I infer width is proportional to count of items in each cluster, though apparently not linearly.
I agree that a single plot comparing the algorithms is important since the purpose of the plot is to compare the algorithms rather than better understand the data on which they've been run. I haven't thought of a good way to do that while still having a cluster-by-cluster visual element. On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 12:47 PM, Ted Dunning <[email protected]> wrote: > What does color mean here? > > What about width of the box? > > When you say median or mean of all cluster distances, do you mean across > that single run? > > I think that this plot is fine as it is except that it needs a legend that > explains all of these issues. My general rule of thumb is that most > figures should have what I call a "Kipling caption". See the caption of > the first image here: http://www.boop.org/jan/justso/butter.htm to see > what > I mean by this. Imagine that there is a very mathematically inclined 4 > year old who is looking at your diagram and quizzing you about every part. > Answer all their questions in the caption and you have a Kipling caption. > > For comparing different runs of the clustering or different algorithms, I > think that a cumulative distribution plot (using plot.ecdf) with all of the > different algorithms on one plot would be the best comparison tool. > > On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 8:33 AM, Dan Filimon <[email protected] > >wrote: > > > As most of the regulars know, I'm working with Ted Dunning on a new > > clustering framework for Mahout that should land in 0.8. > > > > Part of my work is comparing the clustering quality of the new code > > with the existing Mahout implementation. > > > > I compiled a CSV of the quality data [1]. I ran 5 runs of the > > clustering on the 20 newsgroups data set comparing Mahout KMeans (km), > > Ball KMeans (bkm), Streaming KMeans (skm) and Streaming KMeans > > followed by Ball KMeans (bskm). > > > > I'm looking at now making some appealing plots for the data. For > > instance, I think want to make box plots of individual clustering > > runs. Here's an example [2] of what a clustering looks like for one > > run of Mahout's standard k-means. > > > > There's a box for each cluster, the mean distance is the thick line, > > the limits are the 1st and 3rd quartiles and the whiskers are the min > > and max distances. > > The blue horizontal line is the mean of all average cluster distances. > > The green horizontal line is the median of all average cluster distances. > > > > I intend on making similar plots for the other runs and then > > aggregating the means of the runs into box plots for the different > > classes of k-means. > > The main result being that streaming k-means + ball k-means (as done > > in the MR) gives a high quality clustering. > > > > How do you feel about this plot? Is it too dense? Too colorful? Should > > I not draw the median any more? > > What are some other good ways of plotting the quality given the data set? > > > > Thanks! > > > > [1] > > > https://github.com/dfilimon/mahout/blob/skm/examples/src/main/resources/kmeans-comparison-nospace.csv > > [2] > > > http://swarm.cs.pub.ro/~dfilimon/skm-mahout/Mahout%20KMeans%20Run%201.pdf > > >
