How Hierarchical Clustering Works?

Hierarchical clustering involves the following steps:

  1. Calculate the Distance Matrix: Compute the distance between every pair of data points using a distance metric (e.g., Euclidean distance).
  2. Merge Closest Clusters: Identify the two closest clusters and merge them into a single cluster.
  3. Update the Distance Matrix: Recalculate the distances between the new cluster and all other clusters.
  4. Repeat: Repeat steps 2 and 3 until all data points are merged into a single cluster or a stopping criterion is met.

Hierarchical Clustering with Scikit-Learn

Hierarchical clustering is a popular method in data science for grouping similar data points into clusters. Unlike other clustering techniques like K-means, hierarchical clustering does not require the number of clusters to be specified in advance. Instead, it builds a hierarchy of clusters that can be visualized as a dendrogram. In this article, we will explore hierarchical clustering using Scikit-Learn, a powerful Python library for machine learning.

Table of Content

  • Introduction to Hierarchical Clustering
  • How Hierarchical Clustering Works?
  • Dendrograms: Visualizing Hierarchical Clustering
    • How to Read a Dendrogram?
    • Implementing Hierarchical Clustering with Scikit-Learn
  • Advantages and Disadvantages of Hierarchical Clustering

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Conclusion

Hierarchical clustering is a powerful and versatile clustering technique that builds a hierarchy of clusters without requiring the number of clusters to be specified in advance. Scikit-Learn provides an easy-to-use implementation of hierarchical clustering through the AgglomerativeClustering class. By following the steps outlined in this article, you can perform hierarchical clustering on your own datasets and visualize the results using dendrograms....

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