Hierarchical Clustering - Extract Distances/Clusters for each step

btibertbtibert Member, University Professor Posts: 146 Guru
edited October 2019 in Help
Is it possible to extract the height/distance added at each step of a hierarchical clustering step?  Ideal state is the number of clusters and height/distance added at each step.  It would be helpful to be able to extract this, somehow, as an ExampleSet to explore where the cut should be relative to the balance distance/clusters.

It is 100% possible that these tools exist, but they are not jumping out to me.  When combining the Agglomerative Clustering and Flatten Cluster operator, I am not sure where I can extract information to make a data-driven decision on how many clusters to extract.
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  • sgenzersgenzer Administrator, Moderator, Employee, RapidMiner Certified Analyst, Community Manager, Member, University Professor, PM Moderator Posts: 2,959 Community Manager
  • btibertbtibert Member, University Professor Posts: 146 Guru
    Thanks everyone.  Short of fitting the model and associating the clusters in this context, any other suggestions on how to "review" or "validate" cluster assignments? Validating KMeans is straight forward, but wondering about hierarchical methods in a teaching context.
  • MartinLiebigMartinLiebig Administrator, Moderator, Employee, RapidMiner Certified Analyst, RapidMiner Certified Expert, University Professor Posts: 3,503 RM Data Scientist
    https://towardsdatascience.com/understanding-clustering-cf0117148ef4#b7ae is what i like to do, and this is fairly method-independend.


    - Sr. Director Data Solutions, Altair RapidMiner -
    Dortmund, Germany
  • btibertbtibert Member, University Professor Posts: 146 Guru
    Thanks, I love showing my students how to profile with Trees (something that we already covered), but I was hoping that there was something I could show them around how to select the cut in a more data-driven way.  I can totally make it work with smaller datasets to make the intuition easier to grasp, but I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing any operators along the way.
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