Compară metode

	Clustering Ierarhic	Clustering K-means	Analiza Componentelor Principale
Domeniu	Învățare automată	Învățare automată	Învățare automată
Familie	Machine learning	Machine learning	Machine learning
Anul apariției	1963	1967 (formalized 1982)	2002
Autorul original	Ward, J. H.	MacQueen, J. B.; Lloyd, S. P.	Jolliffe, I.T. (textbook); Pearson & Hotelling (origins)
Tip	Unsupervised clustering (agglomerative)	Partitional clustering	Unsupervised dimensionality reduction
Sursa seminală	Ward, J. H. (1963). Hierarchical Grouping to Optimize an Objective Function. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 58(301), 236–244.	Lloyd, S. P. (1982). Least squares quantization in PCM. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 28(2), 129–137.	Jolliffe, I.T. (2002). Principal Component Analysis (2nd ed.). Springer.
Denumiri alternative	Hiyerarşik Kümeleme, hiyerarşik kümeleme, agglomerative clustering, hierarchical agglomerative clustering	k-means clustering, Lloyd's algorithm, k-means partitioning, hard k-means	Temel Bileşenler Analizi (PCA), PCA, principal components analysis, Karhunen-Loève transform
Înrudite	4	4	3
Rezumat	Hierarchical clustering is an unsupervised method that groups observations into nested clusters and draws the result as a dendrogram, so the number of clusters need not be fixed in advance. Its agglomerative form rests on the objective-function grouping criterion introduced by Joe Ward in 1963.	K-means is a classic unsupervised partitional clustering algorithm that divides a dataset into K non-overlapping groups by iteratively assigning each observation to its nearest centroid and updating centroids as the mean of their assigned points. It is one of the most widely used exploratory tools in machine learning and data analysis.	Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is an unsupervised dimensionality-reduction method — given its modern textbook treatment by Ian Jolliffe (2002) — that compresses high-dimensional data into fewer dimensions while preserving the maximum possible variance. It re-expresses correlated variables as a small set of uncorrelated principal components ordered by how much of the data's variation each one captures.