Educational Tool and Active-Learning Class Activity for Teaching Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering

ABSTRACT

To incorporate active learning and cooperative teamwork in statistics classroom, this article introduces a creative three-dimensional educational tool and an in-class activity designed for introducing the topic of agglomerative hierarchical clustering. The educational tool consists of a simple bulletin board and color pushpins (it can also be realized with a less expensive alternative) based on which students work collaboratively in small groups of 3–5 to complete the task of agglomerative hierarchical clustering: they start with n singleton clusters, each corresponding to a pushpin of a unique color on the board, and work step by step to merge all pushpins into one single cluster using the single linkage, complete linkage, or group average linkage criteria. We present a detailed lesson plan that accompanies the designed activity and also provide a real data example in the supplementary materials. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

KEYWORDS:

• Hands-on learning
• Lesson plan
• Multivariate statistical analysis
• Teamwork

Supplementary Materials

In the supplementary materials, we include the worksheet and its solution for the activity introduced in Section 3.2. Additionally, a detailed case study that applies agglomerative hierarchical clustering to a subset of the Olivetti Faces datasets is also included with sample R commands and the corresponding clustering results.