Empirical Study of Partitions Similarity Measures

This paper compares four existing distances and similarity measures between partitions. The partition measures considered in this paper are the Rand Index (RI), the Adjusted Rand Index (ARI), the Variation of Information (VI) and finally, the Normalised Variation of Information (NVI). This work investigates the ability of these partition measures to capture three predefined intuitions: the variation within randomly generated partitions, the sensitivity to small perturbations and finally the independence from the dataset scale . It has been shown that the Adjusted Rand Index (ARI) performed well overall, regarding these three intuitions.