mlr_measures_clust.avg_within: Average Within-Cluster Distance

In mlr3cluster: Cluster Extension for 'mlr3'

Average Within-Cluster Distance

Description

The weighted mean of average pairwise distances within each cluster, where weights are the cluster sizes. Lower values indicate more compact clusters. This measure is scale-dependent and is most useful for comparing clusterings of the same dataset.

Details

If the task contains factor or ordered features, Gower distances (cluster::daisy()) are used instead of Euclidean distances.

Dictionary

This mlr3::Measure can be instantiated via the dictionary mlr3::mlr_measures or with the associated sugar function mlr3::msr():

mlr_measures$get("clust.avg_within")
msr("clust.avg_within")

Meta Information

• Task type: “clust”

• Range: [0, \infty)

• Minimize: TRUE

• Average: macro

• Required Prediction: “partition”

• Required Packages: mlr3, mlr3cluster, cluster

See Also

Dictionary of Measures: mlr3::mlr_measures

as.data.table(mlr_measures) for a complete table of all (also dynamically created) mlr3::Measure implementations.

Other cluster measures: mlr_measures_clust.avg_between, mlr_measures_clust.ch, mlr_measures_clust.davies_bouldin, mlr_measures_clust.dunn, mlr_measures_clust.dunn2, mlr_measures_clust.entropy, mlr_measures_clust.pearsongamma, mlr_measures_clust.silhouette, mlr_measures_clust.wb_ratio, mlr_measures_clust.wss

mlr3cluster documentation built on June 11, 2026, 5:06 p.m.