Hierarchical Adaptive Clustering

This paper studies an adaptive clustering problem. We focus on re-clustering an object set, previously clustered, when the feature set characterizing the objects increases. We propose an adaptive clustering method based on a hierarchical agglomerative approach, Hierarchical Adaptive Clustering (HAC), that adjusts the partitioning into clusters that was established by applying the hierarchical agglomerative clustering algorithm (HACA) (Han and Kamber, 2001) before the feature set changed. We aim to reach the result more efficiently than running HACA again from scratch on the feature-extended object set. Experiments testing the method’s efficiency and a practical distributed systems problem in which the HAC method can be efficiently used (the problem of adaptive horizontal fragmentation in object oriented databases) are also reported.