mdendro: An R package for extended agglomerative hierarchical clustering

TL;DR

The mdendro R package offers advanced agglomerative hierarchical clustering tools, including multifurcated dendrograms and descriptive measures, addressing nonuniqueness issues caused by data ties.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive R package with multiple linkage methods, multifurcated dendrograms, and new descriptive measures for hierarchical clustering analysis.

Findings

Supports grouping more than two clusters simultaneously.

Addresses nonuniqueness problem due to data ties.

Provides five measures for dendrogram analysis.

Abstract

"mdendro" is an R package that provides a comprehensive collection of linkage methods for agglomerative hierarchical clustering on a matrix of proximity data (distances or similarities), returning a multifurcated dendrogram or multidendrogram. Multidendrograms can group more than two clusters at the same time, solving the nonuniqueness problem that arises when there are ties in the data. This problem causes that different binary dendrograms are possible depending both on the order of the input data and on the criterion used to break ties. Weighted and unweighted versions of the most common linkage methods are included in the package, which also implements two parametric linkage methods. In addition, package "mdendro" provides five descriptive measures to analyze the resulting dendrograms: cophenetic correlation coefficient, space distortion ratio, agglomeration coefficient, chaining coefficient and tree balance.