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Identifying a Migration Effect in Complete-Link Hierarchical Clustering

University of California at Santa Barbara

Frank B. Baker

University of Wisconsin at Madison

The migration effect refers to a problem encountered in almost all hierarchical clustering schemes that build up a partition hierarchy in a sequential fashion. Specifically, the least refined partitions constructed by such methods have a tendency to "migrate" away from what could be considered more adequate decompositions of the object set being considered. This phenomenon is illustrated with respect to the well-known complete-link method. In addition, several procedures are suggested for identifying the presence of migration and/or for helping evaluate its severity.

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