Three Dissimilarity Measures to Contrast Dendrograms

Abstract

We discussed three dissimilarity measures between dendrograms defined over the same set, they are triples, partition, and cluster indices. All of them decompose the dendrograms into subsets. In the case of triples and partition indices, these subsets correspond to binary partitions containing some clusters, while in the cluster index, a novel dissimilarity method introduced in this paper, the subsets are exclusively clusters. In chemical applications, the dendrograms gather clusters that contain similarity information of the data set under study. Thereby, the cluster index is the most suitable dissimilarity measure between dendrograms resulting from chemical investigation. An application example of the three measures is shown to remark upon the advantages of the cluster index over the other two methods in similarity studies. Finally, the cluster index is used to measure the differences between five dendrograms obtained when applying five common hierarchical clustering algorithms on a database of 1000 molecules.