Similarity coefficient-based clustering: methods for cell formation

‘Clustering’ is a generic name for a variety of mathematical methods which can be used to find out which objects in a set are similar. Several thousand articles have been published on cluster analysis. It has been applied in many areas such as data recognition, medicine, biology, task selection etc. Most of these applications used certain methods of hierarchical cluster analysis. This is also true in the context of part/ machine grouping. The methods of hierarchical cluster analysis follow a prescribed set of steps (Romesburg, 1984), the main ones being the following.

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