'Determining groups in a hierarchical cluster
I have an algorithm that can group data into a hierarchical cluster tree. The algorithm is the one described in Toby Seagram's Programming Collective Intelligence. The tree output is a binary tree with a "distance" value at each node, that tells you how far apart the two child nodes are.
I can then display this as a Dendrogram and it makes it fairly easy for a human spot which values are grouped together. However I'm having difficult coming up with an algorithm that automatically decides what the groups should be. I'd like to be able to determine automatically:
- The number of group
- Which points should be placed in each group
Is there a standard algorithm for this?
Solution 1:[1]
I have found out that the Calinski-Harabasz index (also known as Variance Ratio Criterion) works well with dendrograms produced by hierarchical clustering. You can find more information (and a comparative study) in this paper.
Sources
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Source: Stack Overflow
| Solution | Source |
|---|---|
| Solution 1 | dkar |