On the cohesion and separability of average-link for hierarchical agglomerative clustering

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Autori principali: Laber, Eduardo Sany, Bastista, Miguel
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Laber, Eduardo Sany
Bastista, Miguel
author_facet Laber, Eduardo Sany
Bastista, Miguel
contents Average-link is widely recognized as one of the most popular and effective methods for building hierarchical agglomerative clustering. The available theoretical analyses show that this method has a much better approximation than other popular heuristics, as single-linkage and complete-linkage, regarding variants of Dasgupta's cost function [STOC 2016]. However, these analyses do not separate average-link from a random hierarchy and they are not appealing for metric spaces since every hierarchical clustering has a 1/2 approximation with regard to the variant of Dasgupta's function that is employed for dissimilarity measures [Moseley and Yang 2020]. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of the performance of average-link in metric spaces, regarding several natural criteria that capture separability and cohesion and are more interpretable than Dasgupta's cost function and its variants. We also present experimental results with real datasets that, together with our theoretical analyses, suggest that average-link is a better choice than other related methods when both cohesion and separability are important goals.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_05097
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the cohesion and separability of average-link for hierarchical agglomerative clustering
Laber, Eduardo Sany
Bastista, Miguel
Machine Learning
Data Structures and Algorithms
F.2.2; I.5.3
Average-link is widely recognized as one of the most popular and effective methods for building hierarchical agglomerative clustering. The available theoretical analyses show that this method has a much better approximation than other popular heuristics, as single-linkage and complete-linkage, regarding variants of Dasgupta's cost function [STOC 2016]. However, these analyses do not separate average-link from a random hierarchy and they are not appealing for metric spaces since every hierarchical clustering has a 1/2 approximation with regard to the variant of Dasgupta's function that is employed for dissimilarity measures [Moseley and Yang 2020]. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of the performance of average-link in metric spaces, regarding several natural criteria that capture separability and cohesion and are more interpretable than Dasgupta's cost function and its variants. We also present experimental results with real datasets that, together with our theoretical analyses, suggest that average-link is a better choice than other related methods when both cohesion and separability are important goals.
title On the cohesion and separability of average-link for hierarchical agglomerative clustering
topic Machine Learning
Data Structures and Algorithms
F.2.2; I.5.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.05097