AmarioForester
Member
Identifying Groups of Users Based on Their Interests Using Clustering Techniques
Objective
The main objective of this analysis is to identify the ASR users’ preferences. The relative frequencies of messages in different subforums for each user is used as input features for a clustering algorithm K-Means.Data retrieved: 15 July 2023
Clusters Evaluation
Using the K-Means cluster method, we first obtained 9 different clusters that are rather unbalanced in nature. Nevertheless, we tried to interpret them:
| Cluster | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| Samples | 494 | 265 | 89 | 331 | 556 | 138 | 253 | 1195 | 1352 |
After getting the desired number of clusters, the silhouette method was used to analyze, how well the clustering had been performed:
Each value on the plot represents the fit of an observation within its assigned cluster. Negative values suggest that an observation has more similarity with other clusters than with its own. As we can see, clusters 7 and 8 are not well-defined. Therefore, they were excluded from the further investigation. There are quite a lot of people belonging to the excluded clusters, but their behaviour could not be clearly classified.
Clusters investigation
We used box plots for visualizing how the input features vary for each of the clusters:
Displaying, how many comments the users from each of the clusters wrote to every topic:
Clusters Description
Based on the gathered data, we can described these clusters:- Cluster 1: The most popular topics within this group are amplifiers and turntables. These users wrote nearly as much to “Ampflifiers, Phono preamp, and Analog Audio Review”, as cluster 9, although there is significantly fewer people in cluster 1. Meanwhile, users from all other clusters posted much fewer messages in this subforum. In the subforums “Stereo and Multichannel Amplifier Reviews” and “Turntables, Phono Amplifiers, Cartridges Review” the current cluster wrote the most messages.
- Cluster 2: The main focus of people from this cluster seems to be on headphones, namely all 3 subforums, that are specialised on this topic (“Headphones and Headphone Amplifier Reviews”, “Headphone Amplifier Reviews & Discussion”, and “Headphone & IEM Reviews & Discussions”). As expected, a big part of messages in these 3 subforums come exactly from this cluster.
- Cluster 3: A group of people from this cluster is really focused on “home theater” topic (more than 50% of their messages on average). Some other topics most of them occasionally write to are those concerning amplifiers and speakers. They also wrote much more messages to “Home Theater AVR and Processor Review” subforum than other cluster (although there are only 89 users in this cluster!).
- Cluster 4: Another cluster, where people actually wrote more messages of their focus, than the largest cluster we took for the investigation. Some users from this cluster are most active in speaker reviews topic. The biggest activity in comparison to other clusters is shown in “Speaker Reviews, Measurements and Discussions” (with a large margin).
- Cluster 5: We can notice the interest in DAC, DAP, and “Home Music Servers, Computers and Streamers” subforums. Most users from this cluster seem to be actually having the same behaviour according to the box plot. But these users do not tend to write a lot of comments according to the bar charts (even though this cluster is relatively large).
- Cluster 6: Some people from this cluster seem to most frequently be writing to the “General Audio Discussions” topic (more than half of their comments). They wrote in this subforum a lot of comments (more than 200 comments per user on average) . But as there is a great variability of this value, which we can notice on the box plot, there can be a handful of people, who write there a lot, while others do not do that much.
- Cluster 9: Now we are considering the largest cluster, that we got performing K-means. As we can see from the bar chart, its scope of interests is also similar to cluster 5. Users from this cluster mostly write to different subforums with DAC and DAP focus or to “Home Music Servers, Computers and Streamers” subforum. As expected, in comparison to other clusters, this group of users wrote the most comments into subforums concerning these topics (but it probably could not be otherwise due to the size of this cluster).
The cluster Amir belongs to: 8. So, Amir does not belong to either of the described above groups.
The top-10 users for each cluster:
