Hierarchical Clustering Based on Local Cores and Sharing Concept

Hierarchical clustering is an important research branch of cluster analysis that has extensive ranges of practical applications. Meanwhile, it still faces problems such as inaccurate, time-consuming, and difficulty in choosing linkage method. In this paper, we present a new Hierarchical Clustering method based on Local Cores and Sharing concept (HCLCS) which takes a "divide-and-merge" framework by first dividing a data set into several small clusters and then merging them hierarchically. To improve the accuracy, the merging process is further divided into two substeps: (1) pre-connect small clusters that belong very likely to the same category, and (2) merge the pre-connected intermediate clusters and the remaining unconnected small clusters in a classical hierarchical way. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data sets show that HCLCS can achieve better performance than existing methods in dealing with data sets with complex structures and is less time-consuming than two state-of-the-art algorithms (SNN-DPC and RSC).