Hierarchical Clustering with Structured Data

Hierarchical Clustering is a clustering algorithm that groups similar data points into clusters based on their similarity. It creates a hierarchical structure of clusters by iteratively merging or splitting the clusters. With structured data, this algorithm can be applied to identify natural groups or patterns within the data.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

  • Does not require the number of clusters to be specified in advance.
  • Provides a hierarchical structure of clusters, allowing for better understanding of the data.
  • Can handle different types of distance measures and linkage methods.

Cons:

  • Computationally expensive for large datasets.
  • Sensitive to outliers, noise, and the order of data points.
  • Difficult to determine the appropriate cut-off threshold for clustering.

Relevant Use Cases

  1. Customer Segmentation: Analyze customer data to identify distinct groups based on their behavior, preferences, or demographics.
  2. Fraud Detection: Cluster financial transactions to detect anomalies or suspicious patterns indicative of fraudulent activities.
  3. Image Segmentation: Cluster pixels in images with structured data to segment different objects or regions.

Resources

  1. scikit-learn Documentation: This page provides detailed documentation on hierarchical clustering with structured data using scikit-learn, a popular machine learning library.
  2. Towards Data Science Article: This article explains the concepts and implementation of hierarchical clustering, including the use of structured data.
  3. Analytics Vidhya Tutorial: This tutorial provides a step-by-step guide to hierarchical clustering and gives insights into interpreting the results.

Top 5 Experts

  1. Peter J. Rousseeuw: Peter is a highly cited researcher in the field of clustering and has published several influential papers on the topic.
  2. Daniel Muellner: Daniel is a developer of the fastcluster library, which provides efficient hierarchical clustering algorithms.
  3. Haeun Moon: Haeun has expertise in applying hierarchical clustering to diverse domains, such as bioinformatics and data visualization.
  4. Linfeng Liu: Linfeng has contributed to various clustering algorithms, including hierarchical clustering, and has experience in handling structured data.
  5. Derek Greene: Derek has published research on clustering and has experience in applying it to real-world datasets.

Note: The GitHub profiles provided for the experts may not exclusively focus on hierarchical clustering, but they have significant expertise in the field of clustering in general.