Stability-Based Model Order Selection in Clustering with Applications to Gene Expression Data

The concept of cluster stability is introduced to assess the validity of data partitionings found by clustering algorithms. It allows us to explicitly quantify the quality of a clustering solution, without being dependent on external information. The principle of maximizing the cluster stability can be interpreted as choosing the most self-consistent data partitioning. We present an empirical estimator for the theoretically derived stability index, based on resampling. Experiments are conducted on well known gene expression data sets, re-analyzing the work by Alon et al. [1] and by Spellman et al. [8].