10121 IUPAC Gold Book - complete linkage 10.1351/goldbook.10121 10121 current 1 Linkage criterion in hierarchical clustering in which the distance between two clusters is the distance between those two objects (one from each cluster) that are farthest apart. Complete linkage tends to find compact clusters of approximately equal size. hierarchical clustering https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/10129 PAC, 2016, 88, 407. 'Vocabulary of concepts and terms in chemometrics (IUPAC Recommendations 2016)' on page 427 (https://doi.org/10.1515/pac-2015-0605) https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/10121/html https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/10121/json https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/10121/plain Citation: 'complete linkage' in IUPAC Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 5th ed. International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry; 2025. Online version 5.0.0, 2025. 10.1351/goldbook.10121 The IUPAC Gold Book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) for individual terms. If you are interested in licensing the Gold Book for commercial use, please contact the IUPAC Executive Director at executivedirector@iupac.org . The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) is continuously reviewing and, where needed, updating terms in the Compendium of Chemical Terminology (the IUPAC Gold Book). Users of these terms are encouraged to include the version of a term with its use and to check regularly for updates to term definitions that you are using. 2026-07-28T02:33:27+00:00