Clustering structure analysis in time-series data with density-based clusterability measure

Clustering is used to gain an intuition of the structures in the data. Most of the current clustering algorithms produce a clustering structure even on data that do not possess such structure. In these cases, the algorithms force a structure in the data instead of discovering one. To avoid false structures in the relations of data, a novel clusterability assessment method called density-based clusterability measure is proposed in this paper. It measures the prominence of clustering structure in the data to evaluate whether a cluster analysis could produce a meaningful insight to the relationships in the data. This is especially useful in time-series data since visualizing the structure in time-series data is hard. The performance of the clusterability measure is evaluated against several synthetic data sets and time-series data sets, which illustrate that the density-based clusterability measure can successfully indicate clustering structure of time-series data.