Clustering based on pairwise similarity?

Question

Suppose I have a list of element pairs and corresponding similarity scores for each one. I want to be able to cluster the elements in this list based on their similarity to one-another. Is there an established method for doing this?

Answer 1

You can use some density-based clustering algorithms such as DBSCAN or H-DBSCAN. For example, if you want to find the neighbors of a pair p that they are located inside a circle with radius epsilon around p, you can compute all neighbors by their 1-sim(pi,p) < epsilon. Because if sim(pi,p) is the similarity between p and pi, 1-sim(pi,p) will be the distance of these two points.