Automatic Method for Determining Cluster Number Based on Silhouette Coefficient

Abstract

Clustering is an important technology that can divide data patterns into meaningful groups, but the number of groups is difficult to be determined. This paper proposes an automatic approach, which can determine the number of groups using silhouette coefficient and the sum of the squared error.The experiment conducted shows that the proposed approach can generally find the optimum number of clusters, and can cluster the data patterns effectively.