The Dendrograph

Abstract

The dendrograph has been developed as a two-dimensional diagram for depicting the mutual relationships among a group of objects whose pairwise similarities are given. The construction of the dendrograph is based on results of clustering using the unweighted pair-group method. The resultant hierarchical arrangement reflects both the within-group and the between-group similarity. In order to accentuate the hierarchical group structure, a rule of ordering is used to impart a pyramid shape to the dendrograph. To allow greater flexibility in the computer program for constructing dendrographs, an option is provided for the user to enter either correlation coefficients or distance functions as the measure of pairwise similarity between objects. Two examples are given to illustrate the usefulness of dendrographs in extracting meaning from multivariate data arrays.