{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/hierarchical-clustering-with-dot-products-1","title":"Hierarchical clustering with dot products recovers hidden tree structure","arxiv_id":"2305.15022","date":"2023-05-24","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2023 11","authors":["Annie Gray","Alexander Modell","Patrick Rubin-Delanchy","Nick Whiteley"],"abstract":"In this paper we offer a new perspective on the well established agglomerative clustering algorithm, focusing on recovery of hierarchical structure. We recommend a simple variant of the standard algorithm, in which clusters are merged by maximum average dot product and not, for example, by minimum distance or within-cluster variance. We demonstrate that the tree output by this algorithm provides a bona fide estimate of generative hierarchical structure in data, under a generic probabilistic graphical model. The key technical innovations are to understand how hierarchical information in this model translates into tree geometry which can be recovered from data, and to characterise the benefits of simultaneously growing sample size and data dimension. We demonstrate superior tree recovery performance with real data over existing approaches such as UPGMA, Ward's method, and HDBSCAN.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15022v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.15022v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"hierarchical-clustering-with-dot-products-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/anniegray52/dot_product_hierarchical","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"clustering","task_name":"Clustering"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2305.15022","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}