Hierarchical Clustering with Scikit-Learn

Introduction

In this lab, we will be using Python's scikit-learn library to perform hierarchical clustering on a few toy datasets. Hierarchical clustering is a method of clustering where you build a hierarchy of clusters, either in a top-down or bottom-up fashion. The goal of hierarchical clustering is to find clusters of points that are similar to each other, and dissimilar to points in other clusters.

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Skills Graph

Import Libraries and Load Data

We will start by importing the necessary libraries and loading the toy datasets that we will be using for our hierarchical clustering examples.

import time
import warnings

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

from sklearn import cluster, datasets
from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler
from itertools import cycle, islice

np.random.seed(0)

## %%
## Generate datasets. We choose the size big enough to see the scalability
## of the algorithms, but not too big to avoid too long running times

n_samples = 1500
noisy_circles = datasets.make_circles(n_samples=n_samples, factor=0.5, noise=0.05)
noisy_moons = datasets.make_moons(n_samples=n_samples, noise=0.05)
blobs = datasets.make_blobs(n_samples=n_samples, random_state=8)
no_structure = np.random.rand(n_samples, 2), None

## Anisotropicly distributed data
random_state = 170
X, y = datasets.make_blobs(n_samples=n_samples, random_state=random_state)
transformation = [[0.6, -0.6], [-0.4, 0.8]]
X_aniso = np.dot(X, transformation)
aniso = (X_aniso, y)

## blobs with varied variances
varied = datasets.make_blobs(
    n_samples=n_samples, cluster_std=[1.0, 2.5, 0.5], random_state=random_state
)

Perform Hierarchical Clustering

We will now perform hierarchical clustering on the toy datasets that we loaded in step 1. We will use different linkage methods such as single, average, complete, and ward to build our clusters.

## Set up cluster parameters
plt.figure(figsize=(9 * 1.3 + 2, 14.5))
plt.subplots_adjust(
    left=0.02, right=0.98, bottom=0.001, top=0.96, wspace=0.05, hspace=0.01
)

plot_num = 1

default_base = {"n_neighbors": 10, "n_clusters": 3}

datasets = [
    (noisy_circles, {"n_clusters": 2}),
    (noisy_moons, {"n_clusters": 2}),
    (varied, {"n_neighbors": 2}),
    (aniso, {"n_neighbors": 2}),
    (blobs, {}),
    (no_structure, {}),
]

for i_dataset, (dataset, algo_params) in enumerate(datasets):
    ## update parameters with dataset-specific values
    params = default_base.copy()
    params.update(algo_params)

    X, y = dataset

    ## normalize dataset for easier parameter selection
    X = StandardScaler().fit_transform(X)

    ## ============
    ## Create cluster objects
    ## ============
    ward = cluster.AgglomerativeClustering(
        n_clusters=params["n_clusters"], linkage="ward"
    )
    complete = cluster.AgglomerativeClustering(
        n_clusters=params["n_clusters"], linkage="complete"
    )
    average = cluster.AgglomerativeClustering(
        n_clusters=params["n_clusters"], linkage="average"
    )
    single = cluster.AgglomerativeClustering(
        n_clusters=params["n_clusters"], linkage="single"
    )

    clustering_algorithms = (
        ("Single Linkage", single),
        ("Average Linkage", average),
        ("Complete Linkage", complete),
        ("Ward Linkage", ward),
    )

    for name, algorithm in clustering_algorithms:
        t0 = time.time()

        ## catch warnings related to kneighbors_graph
        with warnings.catch_warnings():
            warnings.filterwarnings(
                "ignore",
                message="the number of connected components of the "
                + "connectivity matrix is [0-9]{1,2}"
                + " > 1. Completing it to avoid stopping the tree early.",
                category=UserWarning,
            )
            algorithm.fit(X)

        t1 = time.time()
        if hasattr(algorithm, "labels_"):
            y_pred = algorithm.labels_.astype(int)
        else:
            y_pred = algorithm.predict(X)

        plt.subplot(len(datasets), len(clustering_algorithms), plot_num)
        if i_dataset == 0:
            plt.title(name, size=18)

        colors = np.array(
            list(
                islice(
                    cycle(
                        [
                            "#377eb8",
                            "#ff7f00",
                            "#4daf4a",
                            "#f781bf",
                            "#a65628",
                            "#984ea3",
                            "#999999",
                            "#e41a1c",
                            "#dede00",
                        ]
                    ),
                    int(max(y_pred) + 1),
                )
            )
        )
        plt.scatter(X[:, 0], X[:, 1], s=10, color=colors[y_pred])

        plt.xlim(-2.5, 2.5)
        plt.ylim(-2.5, 2.5)
        plt.xticks(())
        plt.yticks(())
        plt.text(
            0.99,
            0.01,
            ("%.2fs" % (t1 - t0)).lstrip("0"),
            transform=plt.gca().transAxes,
            size=15,
            horizontalalignment="right",
        )
        plot_num += 1

plt.show()

Analyze the Results

We will now analyze the results of our hierarchical clustering. Based on the toy datasets that we used, we can make the following observations:

• Single linkage is fast, and can perform well on non-globular data, but it performs poorly in the presence of noise.
• Average and complete linkage perform well on cleanly separated globular clusters, but have mixed results otherwise.
• Ward is the most effective method for noisy data.

It is important to note that while these observations give us some intuition about the algorithms, this intuition might not apply to very high dimensional data.

Summary

In this lab, we learned how to perform hierarchical clustering using Python's scikit-learn library. We used different linkage methods such as single, average, complete, and ward to build our clusters, and analyzed the results based on a few toy datasets. Hierarchical clustering is a powerful technique that can be used to identify clusters of similar data points, and can be useful in a variety of fields such as biology, marketing, and finance.