A Note on Procedures for Testing the Quality of a Clustering of a Set of Objects

Despite the increased application of cluster analysis in decision sciences, few attempts have been made to derive hypothesis‐testing procedures for the evaluation of clustering solutions. In fact, the present paper shows that at least one such attempt failed to specify a meaningful sampling distribution for the test procedure. An alternative index based on the concept of point‐biserial correlation is proposed as a possible recovery measure. The index is subsequently used to form the basis of a valid statistical test for the existence of cluster structure.