Improving document clustering using Okapi BM25 feature weighting

We investigate the effect of feature weighting on document clustering, including a novel investigation of Okapi BM25 feature weighting. Using eight document datasets and 17 well-established clustering algorithms we show that the benefit of tf-idf weighting over tf weighting is heavily dependent on both the dataset being clustered and the algorithm used. In addition, binary weighting is shown to be consistently inferior to both tf-idf weighting and tf weighting. We investigate clustering using both BM25 term saturation in isolation and BM25 term saturation with idf, confirming that both are superior to their non-BM25 counterparts under several common clustering quality measures. Finally, we investigate estimation of the k1 BM25 parameter when clustering. Our results indicate that typical values of k1 from other IR tasks are not appropriate for clustering; k1 needs to be higher.