Manning, Christopher, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze. 2008. “Flat Clustering” and “Hierarchical Clustering.” Chapters 16 and 17 from Introduction to Information Retrieval.
How could we choose among different clustering methods or detailed settings of the models? The simple answers would be the theories and the research questions. And it seems that we should not make the decision based on the results, the same as when we do traditional quantitative analyses. But there are still some space for selection of methods or settings of models. For example, in K-means clustering, how could we decide what could the optimal K both in the sense of statistics and in the sense of our research question?
How could we choose among different clustering methods or detailed settings of the models? The simple answers would be the theories and the research questions. And it seems that we should not make the decision based on the results, the same as when we do traditional quantitative analyses. But there are still some space for selection of methods or settings of models. For example, in K-means clustering, how could we decide what could the optimal K both in the sense of statistics and in the sense of our research question?