Hierarchical Clusterings of Unweighted Graphs

We study the complexity of finding an optimal hierarchical clustering of an unweighted similarity graph under the recently introduced Dasgupta objective function. We introduce a proof technique, called the normalization procedure, that takes any such clustering of a graph G and iteratively improves it until a desired target clustering of G is reached. We use this technique to show both a negative and a positive complexity result. Firstly, we show that in general the problem is NP-complete. Secondly, we consider min-well-behaved graphs, which are graphs H having the property that for any k the graph H(k) being the join of k copies of H has an optimal hierarchical clustering that splits each copy of H in the same optimal way. To optimally cluster such a graph H(k) we thus only need to optimally cluster the smaller graph H. Co-bipartite graphs are min-well-behaved, but otherwise they seem to be scarce. We use the normalization procedure to show that also the cycle on 6 vertices is min-well-behaved.