A New Clustering Validity Index for Evaluating Arbitrary Shape Clusters

When doing clustering analysis it always needs a clustering validity index to evaluate if the present clustering scheme can reflect the real natural structure of the dataset. The clusters founded by the clustering algorithm can be of arbitrary shape, but the exiting validity indices can only assess the validity of convex clusters. To solve this problem a new validity index CompSepa is proposed in this paper, which can evaluate a cluster scheme including both non-convex and convex clusters, and the validity index CompSepa is computed by the minimum-cost spanning tree (MST) of the objects of clusters. Experiments show that the new validity index can evaluate the clustering scheme correctly and effectively.