Heuristic Approaches for the Quartet Method of Hierarchical Clustering

Sergio Consoli, Kenneth Darby-Dowman, Gijs Geleijnse, Jan Korst, Steffen Pauws
2010 IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering  
Given a set of objects and their pairwise distances, we wish to determine a visual representation of the data. We use the quartet paradigm to compute a hierarchy of clusters of the objects. The method is based on an NP-hard graph optimization problem called the Minimum Quartet Tree Cost problem. This paper presents and compares several metaheuristic approaches to approximate the optimal hierarchy. The performance of the algorithms is tested through extensive computational experiments and it is
more » ... hown that the Reduced Variable Neighbourhood Search metaheuristic is the most effective approach to the problem, obtaining high quality solutions in short computational running times.
doi:10.1109/tkde.2009.188 fatcat:sdlzh2i2jnaslmtr6oedy3j4a4