Clustering interval data through kernel-induced feature space

Recently, kernel-based clustering in feature space has shown to perform better than conventional clustering methods in unsupervised classification. In this paper, a partitioning clustering method in kernel-induce feature space for symbolic interval-valued data is introduced. The distance between an item and its prototype in feature space is expanded using a two-component mixture kernel to handle intervals. Moreover, tools for the partition and cluster interpretation of interval-valued data in feature space are also presented. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments with real and synthetic interval data sets were performed and a study comparing the proposed method with different clustering algorithms of the literature is also presented. The clustering quality furnished by the methods is measured by an external cluster validity index (corrected Rand index). These experiments showed the usefulness of the kernel K-means method for interval-valued data and the merit of the partition and cluster interpretation tools.