Feature Ranking of Large, Robust, and Weighted Clustering Result

Abstract

A clustering result needs to be interpreted and evaluated for knowledge discovery. When clustered data represents a sample from a population with known sample-to-population alignment weights, both the clustering and the evaluation techniques need to take this into account. The purpose of this article is to advance the automatic knowledge discovery from a robust clustering result on the population level. For this purpose, we derive a novel ranking method by generalizing the computation of the Kruskal-Wallis H test statistic from sample to population level with two different approaches. Application of these enlargements to both the input variables used in clustering and to metadata provides automatic determination of variable ranking that can be used to explain and distinguish the groups of population. The ranking method is illustrated with an open data and then, applied to advance the educational knowledge discovery from large scale international student assessment data, whose robust clustering into disjoint groups on three different levels of abstraction was performed in [19].