Similarity coefficient methods applied to the cell formation problem: a comparative investigation

Although many similarity coefficients have been proposed, very few comparative studies have been done to evaluate the performance of various similarity coefficients. In this paper, we compare the performance of 20 well-known similarity coefficients. Two hundred and fourteen numerical cell formation problems, which are selected from the literature or generated deliberately, are used for the comparative study. Nine performance measures are used for evaluating the goodness of cell formation solutions. Two characteristics, discriminability and stability of the similarity coefficients are tested under different data conditions. From the results, three similarity coefficients are found to be more discriminable. Jaccard is found to be the most stable similarity coefficient. Four similarity coefficients are not recommendable due to their poor performances.