Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering
In data mining and statistics, hierarchical clustering (also called hierarchical cluster analysis or HCA) is a method of cluster analysis that seeks to build a hierarchy of clusters. Strategies for hierarchical clustering generally fall into two categories: * Agglomerative: This is a " bottom-up" approach: Each observation starts in its own cluster, and pairs of clusters are merged as one moves up the hierarchy. * Divisive: This is a "top-down" approach: All observations start in one cluster, and splits are performed recursively as one moves down the hierarchy. In general, the merges and splits are determined in a greedy manner. The results of hierarchical clustering are usually presented in a dendrogram. The standard algorithm for hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) has a time complexity of \mathcal(n^3) and requires \Omega(n^2) memory, which makes it too slow for even medium data sets. However, for some special cases, optimal efficient agglomerative methods (of c ...
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