Comparison of Three Objective Functions for Conceptual Clustering

Unsupervised clustering algorithms aims to synthesize a dataset such that similar objects are grouped together whereas dissimilar ones are separated. In the context of data analysis, it is often interesting to have tools for interpreting the result. There are some criteria for symbolic attributes which are based on the frequency estimation of the attribute-value pairs. Our point of view is to integrate the construction of the interpretation inside the clustering process. To do this, we propose an algorithm which provides two partitions, one on the set of objects and the second on the set of attribute-value pairs such that those two partitions are the most associated ones. In this article, we present a study of several functions for evaluating the intensity of this association.