Algorithms for hierarchical clustering: an overview

We survey agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithms and discuss efficient implementations that are available in R and other software environments. We look at hierarchical self-organizing maps, and mixture models. We review grid-based clustering, focusing on hierarchical density-based approaches. Finally, we describe a recently developed very efficient (linear time) hierarchical clustering algorithm, which can also be viewed as a hierarchical grid-based algorithm. (C) 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.