Hierarchical Clustering

A clustering approach that represents similarity among data points through a tree-like hierarchical structure.

Hierarchical clustering allows analysts to examine similarity structure in data not through a single cluster count, but through a multi-level tree of relationships. With the help of a dendrogram, distances between clusters can be interpreted visually. It is particularly valuable in bioinformatics, text analysis, and exploratory data studies. However, it can be computationally expensive on large datasets, and the choice of distance metric strongly affects the results.