Expose the Hierarchical cluster tree as XML

[Geo]

Hi,

I’m hereby basically reiterating the need expressed in the following thread:

Manipulating Hierarchical Clustering (DistMatrix) results

The target is to classify binary flags (100+ pcs) in data entries, in order to create clusters of the flags, and in this way classify the data entries. Now, I manually programmed logic to write a Distance Matrix, and used the Hierarchical Clustering (DistMatrix) node to classify them. Unfortunately, the output format is a strange data type called DistanceVectorDataCell, which is accepted only by a viewer node and the Model Writer. This is supposed to be a collection of DoubleCells, but no node c…

KNIME’s Hierarchical Clustering nodes do currently not output the clustering tree (dendrogram) in any processing-friendly format. All one can do is view the tree or generate it as a bitmap image. Consequently, extracting the clustering tree data for reuse (e.g. visualising with another tool than KNIME’s dedicated nodes, extracting all possible cluster configurations, extracting the observation order in the dendrogram, etc.) is impossible.

My suggestion would be to expose the clustering tree as an XML. The latter can be further processed with the XML nodes, json nodes or even flattened with KNIME’s network mining nodes.

Kind regards,
Geo