A Comparison of Categorical Attribute Data Clustering Methods

Clustering data in Euclidean space has a long tradition and there has been considerable attention on analyzing several different cost functions. Unfortunately these result rarely generalize to clustering of categorical attribute data. Instead, a simple heuristic k-modes is the most commonly used method despite its modest performance. In this study, we model clusters by their empirical distributions and use expected entropy as the objective function. A novel clustering algorithm is designed based on local search for this objective function and compared against six existing algorithms on well known data sets. The proposed method provides better clustering quality than the other iterative methods at the cost of higher time complexity.