Context-based geodesic dissimilarity measure for clustering categorical data

Measuring the dissimilarity between two observations is the basis of many data mining and machine learning algorithms, and its effectiveness has a significant impact on learning outcomes. The dissimilarity or distance computation has been a manageable problem for continuous data because many numerical operations can be successfully applied. However, unlike continuous data, defining a dissimilarity between pairs of observations with categorical variables is not straightforward. This study proposes a new method to measure the dissimilarity between two categorical observations, called a context-based geodesic dissimilarity measure, for the categorical data clustering problem. The proposed method considers the relationships between categorical variables and discovers the implicit topological structures in categorical data. In other words, it can effectively reflect the nonlinear patterns of arbitrarily shaped categorical data clusters. Our experimental results confirm that the proposed measure that considers both nonlinear data patterns and relationships among the categorical variables yields better clustering performance than other distance measures.