UPGMA
Sign in to saveAlso known as Unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Mean
UPGMA (unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean) is a simple agglomerative (bottom-up) hierarchical clustering method. It also has a weighted variant, WPGMA, and they are generally attributed to Sokal and Michener.
~11 min read
Encyclopedic overview
13 sectionsContents
- Algorithm
- Working example
- First step
- Second step
- Third step
- Final step
- The UPGMA dendrogram
- Comparison with other linkages
- Uses
- Time complexity
- See also
- References
- External links
UPGMA (unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean) is a simple agglomerative (bottom-up) hierarchical clustering method. It also has a weighted variant, WPGMA, and they are generally attributed to Sokal and Michener.
Note that the unweighted term indicates that all distances contribute equally to each average that is computed and does not refer to the math by which it is achieved. Thus the simple averaging in WPGMA produces a weighted result and the proportional averaging in UPGMA produces an unweighted result (see the working example).
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “UPGMA” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.