a.k. from thus spake a.k.
For several months we've for been taking a look at cluster analysis which seeks to partition sets of data into subsets of similar data, known as clusters. Most recently we have focused our attention on hierarchical clusterings, which are sequences of sets of clusters in which pairs of data that belong to the same cluster at one step belong to the same cluster in the next step.
A simple way of constructing them is to initially place each datum in its own cluster and then iteratively merge the closest pairs of clusters in each clustering to produce the next one in the sequence, stopping when all of the data belong to a single cluster. We have considered three ways of measuring the distance between pairs of clusters, the average distance between their members, the distance between their closest members and the distance between their farthest members, known as average linkage, single linkage and complete linkage respectively, and implemented a reasonably efficient algorithm for generating hierarchical clusterings defined with them, using a min-heap structure to cache the distances between clusters.
Finally, I claimed that there is a more efficient algorithm for generating single linkage hierarchical clusterings that would make the sorting of clusters by size in our
A simple way of constructing them is to initially place each datum in its own cluster and then iteratively merge the closest pairs of clusters in each clustering to produce the next one in the sequence, stopping when all of the data belong to a single cluster. We have considered three ways of measuring the distance between pairs of clusters, the average distance between their members, the distance between their closest members and the distance between their farthest members, known as average linkage, single linkage and complete linkage respectively, and implemented a reasonably efficient algorithm for generating hierarchical clusterings defined with them, using a min-heap structure to cache the distances between clusters.
Finally, I claimed that there is a more efficient algorithm for generating single linkage hierarchical clusterings that would make the sorting of clusters by size in our
ak.clustering
type too expensive and so last time we implemented the ak.rawClustering
type to represent clusterings without sorting their clusters which we shall now use in the implementation of that algorithm.