How to measure similarity between two clustering trees that are produced by hierarchical clustering?

Question

I want to apply a hierarchical clustering method (i.e., agglomerative clustering) over different data sets. I would like to compare the resulted clustering trees. Is there any solution to this? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

There are many ways to do this. I would suggest you to look at the "comparing two dendrograms" section in the vignette for dendextend:

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/dendextend/vignettes/introduction.html#comparing-two-dendrograms

Probably the simplest to use is the cor_cophenetic function.