The present paper proposes a new cluster validity measure as an additional criterion to help the decision making process in fuzzy cluster analysis. This measure, named Fuzzy Silhouette, is a generalization to the fuzzy case of the Average Silhouette Width Criterion, originally conceived to assess crisp (non-fuzzy) data partitions. The Fuzzy Silhouette is more appealing than its crisp counterpar...

Validating a given clustering result is a very challenging task in real world. So for this purpose, several cluster validity indices have been developed in the literature. Cluster validity indices are divided into two main categories: external and internal. External cluster validity indices rely on some supervised information available and internal validity indices utilize the intrinsic structu...

We review two clustering algorithms (hard c-means and single linkage) and three indexes of crisp cluster validity (Hubert's statistics, the Davies-Bouldin index, and Dunn's index). We illustrate two deficiencies of Dunn's index which make it overly sensitive to noisy clusters and propose several generalizations of it that are not as brittle to outliers in the clusters. Our numerical examples sh...

Introduction: Now a day, resulting from life style modification and alteration, fatigue, as a consequence, is not uncommon symptom. Diverse tools are available to measure fatigue status. One of which is Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Treatment (FACIT) fatigue scale. The FACIT is one of the most widely used questionnaires for screening fatigue. The questionnaire has been translated and...

A cluster operator takes a set of data points and partitions the points into clusters (subsets). As with any scientific model, the scientific content of a cluster operator lies in its ability to predict results. This ability is measured by its error rate relative to cluster formation. To estimate the error of a cluster operator, a sample of point sets is generated, the algorithm is applied to e...

Despite the use of art therapy in clinical practice, its appreciation and reported beneficial results, no instruments are available to measure specific effects of art therapy among patients with personality disorders cluster B/C in multidisciplinary treatment. In the present study, we described the development and psychometric evaluation of the Self-expression and Emotion Regulation in Art Ther...

The Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory (YPI) is a self-report measure of juvenile psychopathic traits. Validity data for this measure are limited, especially for nonreferred samples. This report investigated the concurrent validity of the YPI by assessing 171 nonreferred male youth (M age = 12.96 years) with a battery of self-, parent-, and peer-report measures including the Child Behavior Che...

Clustering algorithms have evolved to handle more and more complex structures. However, the measures that allow to qualify the quality of such clustering partitions are rare and have been developed only for specific algorithms. In this work, we propose a new cluster validity measure (CVM) to quantify the clustering performance of hierarchical algorithms that handle overlapping clusters of any s...