What Is a Good Silhouette Score in Clustering?

Clustering algorithms are unsupervised machine learning algorithms that group similar data points together. The goal of clustering is to identify patterns and groupings in a dataset.

The quality of the clustering can be measured by the Silhouette score which is a measure of how close each data point is to its own cluster compared to other clusters.

The Silhouette score ranges from -1 to 1, with a higher score indicating better cluster quality. A perfect score of 1 indicates that all data points in a cluster are perfectly similar and all clusters are perfectly separated from each other.

A score of 0 indicates that the data points are neither similar within their own cluster nor different between clusters. A negative score indicates that the data points in a cluster may be more similar to those in another cluster than within their own.

In general, a good Silhouette score for clustering should be above 0.5 for it to be considered as good or excellent quality clustering. This means that the data points within a cluster should be more similar to each other than they are to those in other clusters, or at least not significantly less similar.

Conclusion:

What is a good Silhouette score in clustering? Generally speaking, a good Silhouette score for clustering should be above 0.