[MATH-1031] Refactoring: Move variance calculation of a centroid cluster to its class

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 3.2
• Fix Version/s: 3.3
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Thorsten Schäfer
• Created: 01/Sep/13 20:28
• Updated: 19/May/14 15:13
• Resolved: 16/Nov/13 18:49

Description

Users might be interested in assessing the quality of each cluster in the calculated clustering. This can be performed by calculating its variance.
The variance calculation is actually performed in other places (e.g. for the MultiKMeans), but not available to end users.
I'd propose to add the functionality into the CentroidCluster. The one issue to consider is that the cluster does not know based on which distance measure it was calculated. In the implementation, I chose to parametrize the method with a distance measure which enables users to also compare the quality based on various distance measures. Alternatively, it would be possible to add the distance measure as a field, which is set by the clustering algorithm.
In the patch I went for the first method and also changed the 2 other places where variance calculation is performed to use the new feature.