Classical and simplified widths

The classical width of Rousseeuw (1987) compares the average dissimilarity of observation \(i\) to the other members of its cluster, \(a_i\), with the smallest average dissimilarity to the members of another cluster, \(b_i\): \[ s_i = \frac{b_i - a_i}{\max(a_i, b_i)}. \] It needs all \(n(n-1)/2\) pairwise dissimilarities. The simplified silhouette of Van der Laan et al. (2003) replaces the two averages by the dissimilarities between \(x_i\) and a representative of each cluster, such as its centroid or medoid, so it needs only an \(n \times K\) matrix. That is what Silhouette() computes.

The two are related but not equal:

s_simple <- Silhouette(P)$sil_width
s_classic <- cluster::silhouette(km$cluster, dist(X))[, "sil_width"]
c(correlation = cor(s_simple, s_classic),
  mean_simplified = mean(s_simple),
  mean_simplified_pac = mean(Silhouette(P, method = "pac")$sil_width),
  mean_classical = mean(s_classic))
#>         correlation     mean_simplified mean_simplified_pac      mean_classical 
#>           0.9538537           0.6663856           0.5375927           0.5528190

The simplified widths rank observations much as the classical ones do, but the simplified average (medoid normalization) is higher, because the distance to a centroid is smaller than the average distance to all members of a cluster. The PAC average is usually closer to the classical level. Thresholds published for the classical average, such as “above 0.5 is reasonable structure”, therefore do not transfer to the simplified average. If you need a fast approximation of the classical width itself for a crisp partition, approxSilhouette() in the Bioconductor package bluster (Lun 2023) is designed for that; the strengths of Silhouette are soft and model-based clusterings, arbitrary cluster-level proximities, and multi-way partitions.

Three properties of the simplified widths

Write \(a_i\) and \(b_i\) for the proximities to the assigned and neighboring clusters, and \(r_i = a_i / b_i\) for dissimilarities.

1. With labels from the same matrix, the widths are not negative. Without cluster or prob_matrix, Silhouette() assigns each observation to its nearest cluster, so \(a_i \le b_i\) and the medoid width \(1 - r_i\) lies in \([0, 1]\). Unlike the classical silhouette, where a negative width flags an observation that is closer on average to another cluster, poorly placed observations show up here as widths near zero. Negative widths appear only when the partition comes from elsewhere (next section).

min(s_simple)
#> [1] 0.02224533

2. PAC is a monotone shrinkage of the medoid width. The PAC width is \((1 - r_i)/(1 + r_i) = s_i / (2 - s_i)\), and \(s_i / (2 - |s_i|)\) in general. It orders observations exactly as the medoid width does and is never larger in absolute value (a medoid width of 0.5 becomes 1/3), so the choice between them changes the level of the average, not which observations look poorly clustered.

3. Squared distances inflate the widths. Replacing every distance by its square replaces \(r_i\) by \(r_i^2\), and the width by \(1 - r_i^2 = s_i(2 - s_i)\). Some functions, such as ppclust::fcm(), return squared distances, so check the scale of the matrix you pass.

all.equal(Silhouette(P^2)$sil_width, s_simple * (2 - s_simple))
#> [1] TRUE

Where the cluster labels come from

A silhouette scores a partition, so it matters which partition is scored. Every width function takes its labels, in order of precedence, from

1. the cluster argument, when supplied;
2. the largest membership in prob_matrix, when supplied;
3. the closest cluster in the proximity matrix.

For k-means at convergence, the nearest center is the assigned cluster, but for other methods it need not be. Without cluster, scoring an average-linkage partition against its own centroids would silently reassign some observations to their nearest centroid; with cluster, the partition is kept and those observations receive negative widths:

hc <- cutree(hclust(dist(X), method = "average"), k = 3)
centers <- apply(X, 2, function(v) tapply(v, hc, mean))
P_hc <- proxy::dist(X, centers)
c(reassigned_without_cluster = sum(Silhouette(P_hc)$cluster != hc),
  negative_with_cluster = sum(Silhouette(P_hc, cluster = hc)$sil_width < 0))
#> reassigned_without_cluster      negative_with_cluster 
#>                          2                          2

If a membership matrix is supplied as prob_matrix, the labels come from the memberships. An observation whose most probable cluster is not its nearest center then gets a negative width, which is informative: it marks disagreement between the fitted model and the geometry. For a Gaussian mixture:

suppressPackageStartupMessages(library(mclust))
gm <- Mclust(X, G = 3, verbose = FALSE)
P_gmm <- as.matrix(proxy::dist(X, t(gm$parameters$mean)))
sum(Silhouette(P_gmm, prob_matrix = gm$z)$sil_width < 0)
#> [1] 11

Ranges of the widths

The ranges assume the default labels. With labels supplied through cluster (or, for Silhouette(), through prob_matrix), every width except the certainty width can be negative and ranges over \([-1, 1]\); the certainty width ranges over \([0, 1]\).

Exactly tied proximities or memberships are resolved in favor of the column that comes first. With ties, the labels (though not the widths, which are then 0) depend on the order of the columns; supply cluster to control them.

Which comparisons are valid

• The same width across partitions of the same data. Average widths of one kind (same function, method, transformation and averaging) can be compared across algorithms or numbers of clusters, keeping in mind that each width favors a particular kind of cluster.
• Not one width against another. The rows of calSilhouette() are on different scales. Choosing “the best method” by the largest value compares scales, not clusterings. Nor are the rows independent evidence: each PAC row is a monotone transformation of the matching medoid row, the PPS, PACS and DBS rank observations identically, the PDS equals the PPS when the clusters have equal weights, and for fuzzy c-means the PPS and distance-based widths coincide (see ?calSilhouette).
• Not simplified against classical. See the first section.
• Fuzzy averages only at the same a. The weights \((\gamma_{i(1)} - \gamma_{i(2)})^a\), built from the two largest memberships, change with a, and so does the average.
• Certainty and density-based widths with care. The certainty width cannot fall below \(1/K\), so its level falls as \(K\) grows. The density-based width is scaled by the most confident observation in the sample, so its average depends on that one observation.
• Choosing \(K\) needs a stated reading. For the distance-based widths, the number of clusters is usually read where the average is largest. For the widths computed from memberships (PACS, PPS, NLPPS, CeS, PDS), whose average typically starts near 1 and falls, Bhat Kapu and Kiruthika (2024) read it from the reverse elbow drop, and the DBS is read from its local maxima (Menardi 2011). The result depends on the algorithm, the width and the averaging; see vignette("soft-clustering", package = "Silhouette").

Session information

sessionInfo()
#> R version 4.6.2 (2026-10-29)
#> Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
#> Running under: Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS
#> 
#> Matrix products: default
#> BLAS:   /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libblas.so.3 
#> LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libopenblasp-r0.3.32.so;  LAPACK version 3.12.0
#> 
#> locale:
#>  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
#>  [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
#>  [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
#>  [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                 
#>  [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
#> [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       
#> 
#> time zone: Etc/UTC
#> tzcode source: system (glibc)
#> 
#> attached base packages:
#> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
#> 
#> other attached packages:
#> [1] mclust_6.1.3     Silhouette_0.9.7 rmarkdown_2.32  
#> 
#> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
#>  [1] gtable_0.3.6       jsonlite_2.0.0     ggsignif_0.6.4     dplyr_1.2.1       
#>  [5] compiler_4.6.2     tidyselect_1.2.1   tidyr_1.3.2        cluster_2.1.8.3   
#>  [9] jquerylib_0.1.4    scales_1.4.0       yaml_2.3.12        fastmap_1.2.0     
#> [13] ggplot2_4.0.4      R6_2.6.1           ggpubr_1.0.0       generics_0.1.4    
#> [17] Formula_1.2-6      knitr_1.52         backports_1.5.1    tibble_3.3.1      
#> [21] car_3.1-5          maketools_1.3.2    bslib_0.12.0       pillar_1.11.1     
#> [25] RColorBrewer_1.1-3 rlang_1.3.0        broom_1.0.13       cachem_1.1.0      
#> [29] xfun_0.62          sass_0.4.10        sys_3.4.3          S7_0.2.2          
#> [33] otel_0.3.0         cli_3.6.6          magrittr_2.0.5     digest_0.6.39     
#> [37] grid_4.6.2         lifecycle_1.0.5    vctrs_0.7.3        rstatix_1.1.0     
#> [41] proxy_0.4-29       evaluate_1.0.5     glue_1.8.1         farver_2.1.2      
#> [45] buildtools_1.0.0   abind_1.4-8        carData_3.0-6      purrr_1.2.2       
#> [49] tools_4.6.2        pkgconfig_2.0.3    htmltools_0.5.9