Trees and Hierarchical Structures

The "raison d'etre" of hierarchical dustering theory stems from one basic phe­ nomenon: This is the notorious non-transitivity of similarity relations. In spite of the fact that very often two objects may be quite similar to a third without being that similar to each other, one still wants to dassify objects according to their similarity. This should be achieved by grouping them into a hierarchy of non-overlapping dusters such that any two objects in ~ne duster appear to be more related to each