Projection Clustering Unfolding: A New Algorithm for Clustering Individuals or Items in a Preference Matrix

In the framework of preference rankings, the interest can lie in clustering individuals or items in order to reduce the complexity of the preference space for an easier interpretation of collected data. The last years have seen a remarkable flowering of works about the use of decision tree for clustering preference vectors. In fact, decision trees are useful and intuitive, but they are very unstable: small perturbations bring big changes. This is the reason why it could be necessary to use more stable procedures in order to clustering ranking data. In this work, a projection clustering unfolding (PCU) algorithm for preference data will be proposed in order to extract useful information in a low-dimensional subspace by starting from a high but mostly empty dimensional space. Comparison between unfolding configurations and PCU solutions will be carried out through Procrustes analysis.