K-ANMI: A Mutual Information Based Clustering Algorithm for Categorical Data

Clustering categorical data is an integral part of data mining and has attracted much attention recently. In this paper, we present kANMI, a new efficient algorithm for clustering categorical data. The k-ANMI algorithm works in a way that is similar to the popular kmeans algorithm, and the goodness of clustering in each step is evaluated using a mutual information based criterion (namely, average normalized mutual information – ANMI) borrowed from cluster ensemble. This algorithm is easy to implement, requiring multiple hash tables as the only major data structure. Experimental results on real datasets show that k-ANMI algorithm is competitive with those state-of-the-art categorical data clustering algorithms with respect to clustering accuracy. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.