Clustering with the Average Silhouette Width

The Average Silhouette Width (ASW; Rousseeuw (1987)) is a popular cluster validation index to estimate the number of clusters. Here we address the question whether it also is suitable as a general objective function to be optimized for finding a clustering. We will propose two algorithms (the standard version OSil and a fast version FOSil) and compare them with existing clustering methods in an extensive simulation study covering the cases of a known and unknown number of clusters. Real data sets are also analysed, partly exploring the use of the new methods with non-Euclidean distances. We will also show that the ASW satisfies some axioms that have been proposed for cluster quality functions (Ackerman and Ben-David (2009)). The new methods prove useful and sensible in many cases, but some weaknesses are also highlighted. These also concern the use of the ASW for estimating the number of clusters together with other methods, which is of general interest due to the popularity of the ASW for this task.