Methods of Hierarchical Clustering

We survey agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithms and discuss efficient implementations that are available in R and other software environments. We look at hierarchical self-organizing maps, and mixture models. We review grid-based clustering, focusing on hierarchical density-based approaches. Finally we describe a recently developed very efficient (linear time) hierarchical clustering algorithm, which can also be viewed as a hierarchical grid-based algorithm.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, 69 reference

An exploration of methodologies to improve semi-supervised hierarchical clustering with knowledge-based constraints

Clustering algorithms with constraints (also known as semi-supervised clustering algorithms) have been introduced to the field of machine learning as a significant variant to the conventional unsupervised clustering learning algorithms. They have been demonstrated to achieve better performance due to integrating prior knowledge during the clustering process, that enables uncovering relevant useful information from the data being clustered. However, the research conducted within the context of developing semi-supervised hierarchical clustering techniques are still an open and active investigation area. Majority of current semi-supervised clustering algorithms are developed as partitional clustering (PC) methods and only few research efforts have been made on developing semi-supervised hierarchical clustering methods. The aim of this research is to enhance hierarchical clustering (HC) algorithms based on prior knowledge, by adopting novel methodologies. [Continues.

An extendable general platform for cluster analysis and validation

This thesis implements a general platform which integrates several commonly used cluster analysis algorithms with ease of use and extendability, along with various validation techniques to analyze the results of algorithms

Algorithms for Hierarchical Clustering: An Overview, II

We survey agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithms and discuss efficient implementations that are available in R and other software environments. We look at hierarchical self-organizing maps, and mixture models. We review grid-based clustering, focusing on hierarchical density-based approaches. Finally we describe a recently developed very efficient (linear time) hierarchical clustering algorithm, which can also be viewed as a hierarchical grid-based algorithm. This review adds to the earlier version, Murtagh and Contreras (2012)

Edge ratio and community structure in networks

International audienceA hierarchical divisive algorithm is proposed for identifying communities in complex networks. To that effect, the definition of community in the weak sense of Radicchi et al. _Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 101, 2658 _2004__ is extended into a criterion for a bipartition to be optimal: one seeks to maximize the minimum for both classes of the bipartition of the ratio of inner edges to cut edges. A mathematical program is used within a dichotomous search to do this in an optimal way for each bipartition. This includes an exact solution of the problem of detecting indivisible communities. The resulting hierarchical divisive algorithm is compared with exact modularity maximization on both artificial and real world data sets. For two problems of the former kind optimal solutions are found; for five problems of the latter kind the edge ratio algorithm always appears to be competitive. Moreover, it provides additional information in several cases, notably through the use of the dendrogram summarizing the resolution. Finally, both algorithms are compared on reduced versions of the data sets of Girvan and Newman _Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 99, 7821 _2002__ and of Lancichinetti et al. _Phys. Rev. E 78, 046110 _2008__. Results for these instances appear to be comparable

State of the art document clustering algorithms based on semantic similarity

The constant success of the Internet made the number of text documents in electronic forms increases hugely. The techniques to group these documents into meaningful clusters are becoming critical missions. The traditional clustering method was based on statistical features, and the clustering was done using a syntactic notion rather than semantically. However, these techniques resulted in un-similar data gathered in the same group due to polysemy and synonymy problems. The important solution to this issue is to document clustering based on semantic similarity, in which the documents are grouped according to the meaning and not keywords. In this research, eighty papers that use semantic similarity in different fields have been reviewed; forty of them that are using semantic similarity based on document clustering in seven recent years have been selected for a deep study, published between the years 2014 to 2020. A comprehensive literature review for all the selected papers is stated. Detailed research and comparison regarding their clustering algorithms, utilized tools, and methods of evaluation are given. This helps in the implementation and evaluation of the clustering of documents. The exposed research is used in the same direction when preparing the proposed research. Finally, an intensive discussion comparing the works is presented, and the result of our research is shown in figures

Fuzzy spectral clustering methods for textual data

Nowadays, the development of advanced information technologies has determined an increase in the production of textual data. This inevitable growth accentuates the need to advance in the identification of new methods and tools able to efficiently analyse such kind of data. Against this background, unsupervised classification techniques can play a key role in this process since most of this data is not classified. Document clustering, which is used for identifying a partition of clusters in a corpus of documents, has proven to perform efficiently in the analyses of textual documents and it has been extensively applied in different fields, from topic modelling to information retrieval tasks. Recently, spectral clustering methods have gained success in the field of text classification. These methods have gained popularity due to their solid theoretical foundations which do not require any specific assumption on the global structure of the data. However, even though they prove to perform well in text classification problems, little has been done in the field of clustering. Moreover, depending on the type of documents analysed, it might be often the case that textual documents do not contain only information related to a single topic: indeed, there might be an overlap of contents characterizing different knowledge domains. Consequently, documents may contain information that is relevant to different areas of interest to some degree. The first part of this work critically analyses the main clustering algorithms used for text data, involving also the mathematical representation of documents and the pre-processing phase. Then, three novel fuzzy versions of spectral clustering algorithms for text data are introduced. The first one exploits the use of fuzzy K-medoids instead of K-means. The second one derives directly from the first one but is used in combination with Kernel and Set Similarity (KS2M), which takes into account the Jaccard index. Finally, in the third one, in order to enhance the clustering performance, a new similarity measure S∗ is proposed. This last one exploits the inherent sequential nature of text data by means of a weighted combination between the Spectrum string kernel function and a measure of set similarity. The second part of the thesis focuses on spectral bi-clustering algorithms for text mining tasks, which represent an interesting and partially unexplored field of research. In particular, two novel versions of fuzzy spectral bi-clustering algorithms are introduced. The two algorithms differ from each other for the approach followed in the identification of the document and the word partitions. Indeed, the first one follows a simultaneous approach while the second one a sequential approach. This difference leads also to a diversification in the choice of the number of clusters. The adequacy of all the proposed fuzzy (bi-)clustering methods is evaluated by experiments performed on both real and benchmark data sets