Reliable Agglomerative Clustering

Abstract

Standard agglomerative clustering suggests establishing a new reliable linkage at every step. However, in order to provide adaptive, density-consistent and flexible solutions, we study extracting all the reliable linkages at each step, instead of the smallest one. Such a strategy can be applied with all common criteria for agglomerative hierarchical clustering. We also study that this strategy with the single linkage criterion yields a minimum spanning tree algorithm. We perform experiments on several real-world datasets to demonstrate the performance of this strategy compared to the standard alternative.