# Learnable Weighting of Intra-Attribute Distances for Categorical Data Clustering with Nominal and Ordinal Attributes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05464 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05464/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

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## Abstract (arXiv)

The success of categorical data clustering generally much relies on the distance metric that measures the dissimilarity degree between two objects. However, most of the existing clustering methods treat the two categorical subtypes, i.e. nominal and ordinal attributes, in the same way when calculating the dissimilarity without considering the relative order information of the ordinal values. Moreover, there would exist interdependence among the nominal and ordinal attributes, which is worth exploring for indicating the dissimilarity. This paper will therefore study the intrinsic difference and connection of nominal and ordinal attribute values from a perspective akin to the graph. Accordingly, we propose a novel distance metric to measure the intra-attribute distances of nominal and ordinal attributes in a unified way, meanwhile preserving the order relationship among ordinal values. Subsequently, we propose a new clustering algorithm to make the learning of intra-attribute distance weights and partitions of data objects into a single learning paradigm rather than two separate steps, whereby circumventing a suboptimal solution. Experiments show the efficacy of the proposed algorithm in comparison with the existing counterparts.