A Hierarchical Multi-Metric Framework for Item Clustering

Item clustering is commonly used for dimensionality reduction, uncovering item similarities and connections, gaining insights of the market structure and recommendations. Hierarchical clustering methods produce a hierarchy structure along with the clusters that can be useful for managing item categories and sub-categories, dealing with indirect competition and new item categorization as well. Nevertheless, baseline hierarchical clustering algorithms have high computational cost and memory usage. In this paper we propose an innovative scalable hierarchical clustering framework, which overcomes these limitations. Our work consists of a binary tree construction algorithm that creates a hierarchy of the items using three metrics, a) Identity, b) Similarity and c) Entropy, as well as a branch breaking algorithm which composes the final clusters by applying thresholds to each branch of the tree. The proposed framework is evaluated on the popular MovieLens 20M dataset achieving significant reduction in both memory consumption and computational time over a baseline hierarchical clustering algorithm.