Minkowski Generalizations of Ward’s Method in Hierarchical Clustering

In this paper, we consider several generalizations of the popular Ward’s method for agglomerative hierarchical clustering. Our work was motivated by clustering software, such as the R function <Emphasis FontCategory="NonProportional">hclust, which accepts a distance matrix as input and applies Ward’s definition of inter-cluster distance to produce a clustering. The standard version of Ward’s method uses squared Euclidean distance to form the distance matrix. We explore the effect on the clustering of using other definitions of distance, such as the Minkowski distance. Copyright Classification Society of North America 2014