An Incremental Approach to Building a Cluster Hierarchy

In this paper we present a novel Incremental Hierarchical Clustering (IHC) algorithm. Our approach aims to construct a hierarchy that satisfies the homogeneity and the monotonicity properties. Working in a bottom-up fashion, a new instance is placed in the hierarchy and a sequence of hierarchy restructuring process is performed only in regions that have been affected by the presence of the new instance. The experimental results on a variety of domains demonstrate that our algorithm is not sensitive to input ordering, can produce a quality cluster hierarchy, and is efficient in terms of its computational time.