Pattern recognition in which objects are linked together by use of an appropriate measure of distance between pairs of objects, and a linkage criterion, which specifies the dissimilarity of sets as a function of the pairwise distances between objects.
See also: Ward’s minimum variance method
Source:
PAC, 2016, 88, 407. 'Vocabulary of concepts and terms in chemometrics (IUPAC Recommendations 2016)' on page 429 (https://doi.org/10.1515/pac-2015-0605)