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In statistics, Ward's method is a criterion applied in hierarchical cluster analysis. Ward's minimum variance method is a special case of the objective function approach originally presented by Joe H. Ward, Jr. [ 1 ] Ward suggested a general agglomerative hierarchical clustering procedure, where the criterion for choosing the pair of clusters ...
The standard algorithm for hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) has a time complexity of () and requires () memory, which makes it too slow for even medium data sets. . However, for some special cases, optimal efficient agglomerative methods (of complexity ()) are known: SLINK [2] for single-linkage and CLINK [3] for complete-linkage clusteri
Educational data mining Cluster analysis is for example used to identify groups of schools or students with similar properties. Typologies From poll data, projects such as those undertaken by the Pew Research Center use cluster analysis to discern typologies of opinions, habits, and demographics that may be useful in politics and marketing.
The average silhouette of the data is another useful criterion for assessing the natural number of clusters. The silhouette of a data instance is a measure of how closely it is matched to data within its cluster and how loosely it is matched to data of the neighboring cluster, i.e., the cluster whose average distance from the datum is lowest. [8]
UPGMA (unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean) is a simple agglomerative (bottom-up) hierarchical clustering method. It also has a weighted variant, WPGMA, and they are generally attributed to Sokal and Michener.
For a clustering example, suppose that five taxa (to ) have been clustered by UPGMA based on a matrix of genetic distances.The hierarchical clustering dendrogram would show a column of five nodes representing the initial data (here individual taxa), and the remaining nodes represent the clusters to which the data belong, with the arrows representing the distance (dissimilarity).
In cluster analysis, the elbow method is a heuristic used in determining the number of clusters in a data set. The method consists of plotting the explained variation as a function of the number of clusters and picking the elbow of the curve as the number of clusters to use.
The method is also known as nearest neighbour clustering. The result of the clustering can be visualized as a dendrogram, which shows the sequence in which clusters were merged and the distance at which each merge took place. [3] Mathematically, the linkage function – the distance D(X,Y) between clusters X and Y – is described by the expression