Comparison of Agglomerative and Partitional Document Clustering Algorithms

Fast and high-quality document clustering algorithms play an important role in providing intuitive navigation and browsing mechanisms by organizing large amounts of information into a small number of meaningful clusters, and in greatly improving the retrieval performance either via cluster-driven dimensionality reduction, term-weighting, or query expansion. This ever-increasing importance of document clustering and the expanded range of its applications led to the development of a number of novel algorithms and new clustering criterion functions, especially in the context of partitional clustering. The focus of this paper is to experimentally evaluate the performance of seven different global criterion functions in the context of agglomerative clustering algorithms and compare the clustering results of agglomerative algorithms and partitional algorithms for each one of the criterion functions. Our experimental evaluation shows that for every criterion function, partitional algorithms always lead to better clustering results than agglomerative algorithms, which suggests that partitional clustering algorithms are well-suited for clustering large document datasets due to not only their relatively low computational requirements, but also comparable or even better clustering performance.