Ultrametric Cluster Hierarchies: I Want `em All!

Ultrametric Cluster Hierarchies: I Want `em All!

Abstract

Hierarchical clustering is a powerful tool for exploratory data analysis, organizing data into a tree of clusterings from which a partition can be chosen. This paper generalizes these ideas by proving that, for any reasonable hierarchy, one can optimally solve any center-based clustering objective over it (such as k-means). Moreover, these solutions can be found exceedingly quickly and are themselves necessarily hierarchical. Thus, given a cluster tree, we show that one can quickly access a plethora of new, equally meaningful hierarchies. Just as in standard hierarchical clustering, one can then choose any desired partition from these new hierarchies. We conclude by verifying the utility of our proposed techniques across datasets, hierarchies, and partitioning schemes.

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Authors
  • Andrew, Draganov
  • Pascal, Weber
  • Rasmus, Jørgensen
  • Anna, Beer
  • Claudia, Plant
  • Ira, Assent
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Shortfacts
Category
Paper in Conference Proceedings or in Workshop Proceedings (Paper)
Event Title
The Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025)
Divisions
Data Mining and Machine Learning
Event Location
San Diego
Event Type
Conference
Event Dates
02.12.2025-07.12.2025
Date
3 December 2025
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