We have used Washington photometry for 90 star cluster candidates of small angular size -typically \sim 11 \arcsec in radius- distributed within nine selected regions in the inner disc of the Large Magellanic Cloud ( LMC ) to disentangle whether they are genuine physical system , and to estimate the ages for the confirmed clusters .
In order to avoid a misleading interpretation of the cluster colour-magnitude diagrams ( CMDs ) , we applied a subtraction procedure to statistically clean them from field star contamination .
Out of the 90 candidate clusters studied , 61 of them resulted to be genuine physical systems , whereas the remaining ones were classified as possible non-clusters since either their CMDs and/or the distribution of stars in the respective fields do not resemble those of stellar aggregates .
We statistically show that \sim ( 13 \pm 6 ) \% of the catalogued clusters in the inner disc could be possible non-clusters , independently of their deprojected distances .
We derived the ages for the confirmed clusters from the fit of theoretical isochrones to the cleaned cluster CMDs .
The derived ages resulted to be in the age range 7.8 \leq log ( t ) \leq 9.2 .
Finally , we built cluster frequencies for the different studied regions and found that there exists some spatial variation of the LMC CF throughout the inner disc .
Particularly , the innermost field contains a handful of clusters older than \sim 2 Gyr , while the wider spread between different CFs has taken place during the most recent 50 Myr of the galaxy lifetime .