Title
Assessing variable importance in clustering: a new method based on unsupervised binary decision trees
Abstract
We consider different approaches for assessing variable importance in clustering. We focus on clustering using binary decision trees (CUBT), which is a non-parametric top-down hierarchical clustering method designed for both continuous and nominal data. We suggest a measure of variable importance for this method similar to the one used in Breiman’s classification and regression trees. This score is useful to rank the variables in a dataset, to determine which variables are the most important or to detect the irrelevant ones. We analyze both stability and efficiency of this score on different data simulation models in the presence of noise, and compare it to other classical variable importance measures. Our experiments show that variable importance based on CUBT is much more efficient than other approaches in a large variety of situations.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1007/s00180-018-0857-0
Computational Statistics
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Unsupervised learning,CUBT,Deviance,Variable importance,Variables ranking
Journal
34
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
1613-9658
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
5
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ghattas Badih100.34
Michel Pierre200.34
Boyer Laurent300.34