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 homogeneity and monotonicity properties. Working in a bottom-up fashion, a new instance is placed in the hierarchy and a sequence of hierarchy restructuring processes 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 computational time.