Cluster Validity Measures for Network Data

Modularity is one of the evaluation measures for network partitions and is used as the merging criterion in the Louvain method. To construct useful cluster validity measures and clustering methods for network data, network cluster validity measures are proposed based on the traditional indices. The effectiveness of the proposed measures are compared and applied to determine the optimal number of clusters. The network cluster partitions of various network data which are generated from the Polaris dataset are obtained by k -medoids with Dijkstra’s algorithm and evaluated by the proposed measures as well as the modularity. Our numerical experiments show that the Dunn’s index and the Xie-Beni’s index-based measures are effective for network partitions compared to other indices.