Hierarchical Clustering

Hierarchical clustering

Hierarchical clustering involves creating a hierarchy of clusters. Representing data objects in the form of a hierarchy is useful for data summarization and visualization. For example, consider we want to organize the people in an organization into major groups such as executives, managers, and staff. We can further partition these above into smaller sub-groups. This is the basic idea of hierarchical clustering.

Agglomerative hierarchical clustering

Agglomerative hierarchical clustering uses a bottom-up strategy. In this strategy, each instance is initially treated as a cluster. At each successive iteration of this clustering algorithm, a cluster is merged with other most similar clusters until only one large cluster is formed.