Sectors on sectors (SonS): A new hierarchical clustering visualization tool

Clustering techniques have been widely applied to extract information from high-dimensional data structures in the last few years. Graphs are especially relevant for clustering, but many graphs associated with hierarchical clustering do not give any information about the values of the centroids´ attributes and the relationships among them. In this paper, we propose a new visualization approach for hierarchical cluster analysis in which the above-mentioned information is available. The method is based on pie charts. The pie charts are divided into several pie segments or sectors corresponding to each cluster. The radius of each pie segment is proportional to the number of patterns included in each cluster. By means of new divisions in each pie sector and a color bar with as many labels as attributes, we can extract all the existing relationships among centroids´ attributes at any hierarchy level. The methodology is tested in one synthetic data set and one real data set. Achieved results show the suitability and usefulness of the proposed approach.