An Improved Hierarchical Clustering Algorithm Based on the Idea of Population Reproduction and Fusion

Aiming to resolve the problems of the traditional hierarchical clustering algorithm that cannot find clusters with uneven density, requires a large amount of calculation, and has low efficiency, this paper proposes an improved hierarchical clustering algorithm (referred to as PRI-MFC) based on the idea of population reproduction and fusion. It is divided into two stages: fuzzy pre-clustering and Jaccard fusion clustering. In the fuzzy pre-clustering stage, it determines the center point, uses the product of the neighborhood radius eps and the dispersion degree fog as the benchmark to divide the data, uses the Euclidean distance to determine the similarity of the two data points, and uses the membership grade to record the information of the common points in each cluster. In the Jaccard fusion clustering stage, the clusters with common points are the clusters to be fused, and the clusters whose Jaccard similarity coefficient between the clusters to be fused is greater than the fusion parameter jac are fused. The common points of the clusters whose Jaccard similarity coefficient between clusters is less than the fusion parameter jac are divided into the cluster with the largest membership grade. A variety of experiments are designed from multiple perspectives on artificial datasets and real datasets to demonstrate the superiority of the PRI-MFC algorithm in terms of clustering effect, clustering quality, and time consumption. Experiments are carried out on Chinese household financial survey data, and the clustering results that conform to the actual situation of Chinese households are obtained, which shows the practicability of this algorithm.