Selecting the number of clusters with silhouette analysis on KMeans clustering¶
Silhouette analysis can be used to study the separation distance between the resulting clusters. The silhouette plot displays a measure of how close each point in one cluster is to points in the neighboring clusters and thus provides a way to assess parameters like number of clusters visually. This measure has a range of [-1, 1].
Silhoette coefficients (as these values are referred to as) near +1 indicate that the sample is far away from the neighboring clusters. A value of 0 indicates that the sample is on or very close to the decision boundary between two neighboring clusters and negative values indicate that those samples might have been assigned to the wrong cluster.
In this example the silhouette analysis is used to choose an optimal value for
n_clusters. The silhouette plot shows that the n_clusters value of 3, 5
and 6 are a bad pick for the given data due to the presence of clusters with
below average silhouette scores and also due to wide fluctuations in the size
of the silhouette plots. Silhouette analysis is more ambivalent in deciding
between 2 and 4.
Also from the thickness of the silhouette plot the cluster size can be
visualized. The silhouette plot for cluster 0 when n_clusters is equal to
2, is bigger in size owing to the grouping of the 3 sub clusters into one big
cluster. However when the n_clusters is equal to 4, all the plots are more
or less of similar thickness and hence are of similar sizes as can be also
verified from the labelled scatter plot on the right.
Script output:
For n_clusters = 2 The average silhouette_score is : 0.704978749608
For n_clusters = 3 The average silhouette_score is : 0.588200401213
For n_clusters = 4 The average silhouette_score is : 0.650518663273
For n_clusters = 5 The average silhouette_score is : 0.563764690262
For n_clusters = 6 The average silhouette_score is : 0.450466629437
Python source code: plot_kmeans_silhouette_analysis.py
from __future__ import print_function
from sklearn.datasets import make_blobs
from sklearn.cluster import KMeans
from sklearn.metrics import silhouette_samples, silhouette_score
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.cm as cm
import numpy as np
print(__doc__)
# Generating the sample data from make_blobs
# This particular setting has one distict cluster and 3 clusters placed close
# together.
X, y = make_blobs(n_samples=500,
n_features=2,
centers=4,
cluster_std=1,
center_box=(-10.0, 10.0),
shuffle=True,
random_state=1) # For reproducibility
range_n_clusters = [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
for n_clusters in range_n_clusters:
# Create a subplot with 1 row and 2 columns
fig, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(1, 2)
fig.set_size_inches(18, 7)
# The 1st subplot is the silhouette plot
# The silhouette coefficient can range from -1, 1 but in this example all
# lie within [-0.1, 1]
ax1.set_xlim([-0.1, 1])
# The (n_clusters+1)*10 is for inserting blank space between silhouette
# plots of individual clusters, to demarcate them clearly.
ax1.set_ylim([0, len(X) + (n_clusters + 1) * 10])
# Initialize the clusterer with n_clusters value and a random generator
# seed of 10 for reproducibility.
clusterer = KMeans(n_clusters=n_clusters, random_state=10)
cluster_labels = clusterer.fit_predict(X)
# The silhouette_score gives the average value for all the samples.
# This gives a perspective into the density and separation of the formed
# clusters
silhouette_avg = silhouette_score(X, cluster_labels)
print("For n_clusters =", n_clusters,
"The average silhouette_score is :", silhouette_avg)
# Compute the silhouette scores for each sample
sample_silhouette_values = silhouette_samples(X, cluster_labels)
y_lower = 10
for i in range(n_clusters):
# Aggregate the silhouette scores for samples belonging to
# cluster i, and sort them
ith_cluster_silhouette_values = \
sample_silhouette_values[cluster_labels == i]
ith_cluster_silhouette_values.sort()
size_cluster_i = ith_cluster_silhouette_values.shape[0]
y_upper = y_lower + size_cluster_i
color = cm.spectral(float(i) / n_clusters)
ax1.fill_betweenx(np.arange(y_lower, y_upper),
0, ith_cluster_silhouette_values,
facecolor=color, edgecolor=color, alpha=0.7)
# Label the silhouette plots with their cluster numbers at the middle
ax1.text(-0.05, y_lower + 0.5 * size_cluster_i, str(i))
# Compute the new y_lower for next plot
y_lower = y_upper + 10 # 10 for the 0 samples
ax1.set_title("The silhouette plot for the various clusters.")
ax1.set_xlabel("The silhouette coefficient values")
ax1.set_ylabel("Cluster label")
# The vertical line for average silhoutte score of all the values
ax1.axvline(x=silhouette_avg, color="red", linestyle="--")
ax1.set_yticks([]) # Clear the yaxis labels / ticks
ax1.set_xticks([-0.1, 0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, 1])
# 2nd Plot showing the actual clusters formed
colors = cm.spectral(cluster_labels.astype(float) / n_clusters)
ax2.scatter(X[:, 0], X[:, 1], marker='.', s=30, lw=0, alpha=0.7,
c=colors)
# Labeling the clusters
centers = clusterer.cluster_centers_
# Draw white circles at cluster centers
ax2.scatter(centers[:, 0], centers[:, 1],
marker='o', c="white", alpha=1, s=200)
for i, c in enumerate(centers):
ax2.scatter(c[0], c[1], marker='$%d$' % i, alpha=1, s=50)
ax2.set_title("The visualization of the clustered data.")
ax2.set_xlabel("Feature space for the 1st feature")
ax2.set_ylabel("Feature space for the 2nd feature")
plt.suptitle(("Silhouette analysis for KMeans clustering on sample data "
"with n_clusters = %d" % n_clusters),
fontsize=14, fontweight='bold')
plt.show()
Total running time of the example: 4.43 seconds ( 0 minutes 4.43 seconds)