AIBcont: Cluster Continuous Data Using the Agglomerative Information...

In IBclust: Information Bottleneck Methods for Clustering Mixed-Type Data

Cluster Continuous Data Using the Agglomerative Information Bottleneck Algorithm

Description

The AIBcont function implements the Agglomerative Information Bottleneck (AIB) algorithm for hierarchical clustering of datasets containing categorical variables. This method merges clusters so that information retention is maximised at each step to create meaningful clusters, leveraging bandwidth parameters to handle different categorical data types (nominal and ordinal) effectively \insertCiteslonim_aib_1999IBclust.

Usage

AIBcont(X, s = -1, scale = TRUE)

Arguments

X	A data frame containing the categorical data to be clustered. All variables should be categorical, either factor (for nominal variables) or ordered (for ordinal variables).
s	A numeric value or vector specifying the bandwidth parameter(s) for continuous variables. The values must be greater than 0. The default value is -1, which enables the automatic selection of optimal bandwidth(s).
scale	A logical value indicating whether the continuous variables should be scaled to have unit variance before clustering. Defaults to TRUE.

Details

The AIBcat function applies the Agglomerative Information Bottleneck algorithm to do hierarchical clustering of datasets containing only continuous variables, both nominal and ordinal. The algorithm uses an information-theoretic criterion to merge clusters so that information retention is maximised at each step to create meaningful clusters with maximal information about the original distribution.

The function utilizes the Gaussian kernel \insertCitesilverman_density_1998IBclust for estimating probability densities of continuous features. The kernel is defined as:

K_c\left(\frac{x - x'}{s}\right) = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi}} \exp\left\{-\frac{\left(x - x'\right)^2}{2s^2}\right\}, \quad s > 0.

The bandwidth parameter s, which controls the smoothness of the density estimate, is automatically determined by the algorithm if not provided by the user.

Value

A list containing the following elements:

merges	A data frame with 2 columns and n rows, showing which observations are merged at each step.
merge_costs	A numeric vector tracking the cost incurred by each merge I(Z_m ; Y) - I(Z_{m-1} ; Y).
partitions	A list containing n sub-lists. Each sub-list includes the cluster partition at each step.
I_Z_Y	A numeric vector including the mutual information I(Z_{m}; Y) as the number of clusters m increases.
I_X_Y	A numeric value of the mutual information I(X; Y) between observation indices and location.
info_ret	A numeric vector of length n including the fraction of the original information retained after each merge.
dendrogram	A dendrogram visualising the cluster hierarchy. The height is determined by the cost of cluster merges.

Author(s)

Efthymios Costa, Ioanna Papatsouma, Angelos Markos

References

\insertRef

slonim_aib_1999IBclust

\insertRef

silverman_density_1998IBclust

See Also

AIBmix, AIBcat

Examples

# Generate simulated continuous data
set.seed(123)
X <- matrix(rnorm(1000), ncol = 5)  # 200 observations, 5 features

# Run AIBcont with automatic bandwidth selection 
result <- AIBcont(X = X, s = -1, scale = TRUE)

# Print clustering results
plot(result$dendrogram, xlab = "", sub = "")  # Plot dendrogram

IBclust documentation built on Aug. 8, 2025, 6:39 p.m.