One of the most widely used techniques for data clustering is agglomerative clustering. Such algorithms have been long used across many different fields ranging from computational biology to social sciences to computer vision in part because their output is easy to interpret. Unfortunately, it is well known, however, that many of the classic agglomerative clustering algorithms are not robust to noise \cite{qcluster2005}. In this paper we propose and analyze a new robust algorithm for bottom-up agglomerative clustering. We show that our algorithm can be used to cluster accurately in cases where the data satisfies a number of natural properties and where the traditional agglomerative algorithms fail. We also show how to adapt our algorithm to the inductive setting where our given data is only a small random sample of the entire data set. Experimental evaluations on synthetic and real world data sets show that our algorithm consistently achieves better performance than other hierarchical algorithms in the presence of noise.

本文提出了一种新的鲁棒的自下而上聚类算法，并展示了在满足一定自然属性且传统算法失效的情况下，该算法可以被用来进行准确的聚类。同时，该算法也被适用于归纳设置，并在合成数据和真实数据集上的实验表明，在存在噪音时，与其他分层算法相比，该算法可以获得更好的表现。

强健层次聚类