From the course: Machine Learning and AI Foundations: Clustering and Association

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What does silhouette mean?

What does silhouette mean?

From the course: Machine Learning and AI Foundations: Clustering and Association

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What does silhouette mean?

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- [Instructor] I want to talk about the whole concept of the silhouette statistic. You may have noticed in MODELLER as part of the MODELLER summary, you get this very visually-compelling red-yellow-green thermometer indicator of the cluster quality. That's not unique to MODELLER. The silhouette concept goes all the way back to the '80s. In a paper that was written back then, this is really the closest we come in cluster analysis to something like R-squared and the like. There's just not the same consensus. There's other challenges as well, because remember there's a lot of things to keep in mind with why we choose the particular cluster analysis that we do. But let's talk about the logic of silhouette. Here's a quick scatterplot that I put together. To keep it simple, I'm using just two variables, obviously, to make it two-dimensional. And I'm only plotting a small number of points that all belong to one cluster. The whole concept of silhouette is to take all of these points one at a…

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