Preventing Overlaps in Agglomerative Hierarchical Conceptual Clustering

Hierarchical Clustering is an unsupervised learning task, whi-ch seeks to build a set of clusters ordered by the inclusion relation. It is usually assumed that the result is a tree-like structure with no overlapping clusters, i.e., where clusters are either disjoint or nested. In Hierarchical Conceptual Clustering (HCC), each cluster is provided with a conceptual description which belongs to a predefined set called the pattern language. Depending on the application domain, the elements in the pattern language can be of different nature: logical formulas, graphs, tests on the attributes, etc. In this paper, we tackle the issue of overlapping concepts in the agglomerative approach of HCC. We …