sklearn.metrics.silhouette_samples

sklearn.metrics.silhouette_samples(X, labels, metric='euclidean', **kwds)

Compute the Silhouette Coefficient for each sample.

The Silhoeutte Coefficient is a measure of how well samples are clustered with samples that are similar to themselves. Clustering models with a high Silhouette Coefficient are said to be dense, where samples in the same cluster are similar to each other, and well separated, where samples in different clusters are not very similar to each other.

The Silhouette Coefficient is calculated using the mean intra-cluster distance (a) and the mean nearest-cluster distance (b) for each sample. The Silhouette Coefficient for a sample is (b - a) / max(a, b).

This function returns the Silhouette Coefficient for each sample.

The best value is 1 and the worst value is -1. Values near 0 indicate overlapping clusters.

Parameters :

X : array [n_samples_a, n_samples_a] if metric == “precomputed”, or, [n_samples_a, n_features] otherwise

Array of pairwise distances between samples, or a feature array.

labels : array, shape = [n_samples]

label values for each sample

metric : string, or callable

The metric to use when calculating distance between instances in a feature array. If metric is a string, it must be one of the options allowed by sklearn.metrics.pairwise.pairwise_distances. If X is the distance array itself, use “precomputed” as the metric.

`**kwds` : optional keyword parameters

Any further parameters are passed directly to the distance function. If using a scipy.spatial.distance metric, the parameters are still metric dependent. See the scipy docs for usage examples.

Returns :

silhouette : array, shape = [n_samples]

Silhouette Coefficient for each samples.

References

[R174]

Peter J. Rousseeuw (1987). “Silhouettes: a Graphical Aid to the Interpretation and Validation of Cluster Analysis”. Computational and Applied Mathematics 20: 53-65.

[R175]

Wikipedia entry on the Silhouette Coefficient