A Secure Distributed Framework for Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering Construction

This paper presents a general framework for constructing any agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm over partitioned data. It is assumed that data is distributed between two (or more) parties horizontally, such that for mutual benefits the participated parties are willing to identify the clusters' structure on their data as a whole, but for privacy restrictions, they avoid to share the original datasets. To this end, in this study, we propose general algorithms based on secure scalar product and secure hamming distance computation to securely compute the desired criteria for shaping the clusters' scheme. The proposed approach covers all possible secure agglomerative hierarchical clustering construction when data is distributed between two (or more) parties, including both numerical and categorical data.