Feature selection as retrospective pruning in hierarchical clustering

Although feature selection is a central problem in inductive learning as suggested by the growing amount of research in this area, most of the work has been carried out under the supervised learning paradigm, paying little attention to unsupervised learning tasks and, particularly, clustering tasks. In this paper, we analyze the particular benefits that feature selection may provide in hierarchical clustering. We propose a view of feature selection as a tree pruning process similar to those used in decision tree learning. Under this framework, we perform several experiments using different pruning strategies and considering a multiple prediction task. Results suggest that hierarchical clusterings can be greatly simplified without diminishing accuracy.