Hierarchical clustering

Hierarchical clustering is a method used to group similar items together based on their characteristics. Think of it like organizing a large collection of books: starting with each book as its own group, then merging the most similar pairs into larger categories, and repeating this process until all books are grouped into a hierarchy. This method creates a tree-like structure called a dendrogram, showing how groups are related at various levels of similarity. It helps identify natural groupings within data without predefining the number of clusters, making it useful for understanding complex data relationships.