On the Silhouette Plot in Cluster Analysis

To find the appropriate number of clusters in a data set is very important issue in cluster analysis. In general, we do not know a real cluster structures, the number and composition of the groups for the given data. The silhouette plot is introduced and has been implemented to find the number of clusters with k-means clustering. Silhouette plot provides a very useful visible criterion to find the number of cluster in statistical cluster analysis. The silhouette plot is adapted to the well known real data sets to find the appropriate number of clusters.