# September 2019 Archives

## Cut Price Clusterings

Last month we saw how we could efficiently generate hierarchical clusterings, which are sequences of sets of clusters, which are themselves subsets of a set of data that each contain elements that are similar to each other, such that if a pair of data are in the same clustering at one step then they must be in the same clustering in the next which will always be the case if we move from one step to the next by merging the closest pairs of clusters. Specifically, we used our ak.minHeap implementation of the min-heap structure to cache the distances between clusters, saving us the expense of recalculating them for clusters that don't change from one step in the hierarchy to the next.
Recall that we used three different schemes for calculating the distance between a pair of clusters, the average distance between their members, known as average linkage, the distance between their closest members, known as single linkage, and the distance between their farthest members, known as complete linkage, and that I concluded by noting that our algorithm was about as efficient as possible in general but that there is a much more efficient scheme for single linkage clusterings; efficient enough that sorting the clusters in each clustering by size would be the most costly operation and so in this post we shall implement objects to represent clusterings that don't do that.

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### Gallimaufry

 AKCalc ECMA Endarkenment Turning Sixteen

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