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Abstract

We introduce a family of unsupervised algorithms, numerical taxonomy clustering, to simultaneously
cluster data, and to learn a taxonomy that encodes the relationship between the clusters. The algorithms
work by maximizing the dependence between the taxonomy and the original data. The resulting taxonomy is a
more informative visualization of complex data than simple clustering; in addition, taking into account the relations
between different clusters is shown to substantially improve the quality of the clustering, when compared
with state-of-the-art algorithms in the literature (both spectral clustering and a previous dependence maximization
approach). We demonstrate our algorithm on image and text data.