Practical Applications of Data Mining

296 Chapter 7 Clustering

following the procedure described above. The final result represented with a

tree-like dendrogram is shown in Figure 7.2.

When C

12

and C

3456

are merged together to form C

123456

, the only other

remaining cluster left to be merged is C

78

. Merging it with C

123456

, we finally

have only one cluster that contains all the objects. At this point, we must apply

a critical value to determine the expected number of clusters to make the

result of our clustering meaningful and informative. If we set the value to be

less than or equal to $5,000 (i.e., the distance ranges between two objects are

smaller than or equal to $5,000), ...