Applied Unsupervised Learning with Python

Chapter 2

Hierarchical Clustering

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

• Implement the hierarchical clustering algorithm from scratch by using packages
• Perform agglomerative clustering
• Compare k-means with hierarchical clustering

In this chapter, we will use hierarchical clustering to build stronger groupings which make more logical sense.

Introduction

In this chapter, we will expand on the basic ideas that we built in Chapter 1, Introduction to Clustering, by surrounding clustering with the concept of similarity. Once again, we will be implementing forms of the Euclidean distance to capture the notion of similarity. It is important to bear in mind that the Euclidean distance just happens to be one of the ...