|Talks|

Hierarchical Single Linkage Clustering for Community Detection

Visiting speaker
Hybrid
Past Talk
Ryan DeWolfe
MSc Student, Toronto Metropolitan University
Jan 21, 2026
1:30 pm
EST
Jan 21, 2026
1:30 pm
In-person
Portsoken Street
London, E1 8PH, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Network Science Institute
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Room
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK
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Talk recording

Finding groups of similar data in an unsupervised method, called clustering, is a fundamental problem in data science. When working with data in the form of a graph, we often consider an edge as an indicator of similarity between two nodes, and clustering (or community detection) involves finding sets of nodes that have many edges between them. Unfortunately, there is not a single definition of what makes a community, which allows for a myriad of community detection algorithms. Furthermore, most community detection approaches make very strong assumptions about communities in the data, such as every vertex must belong to exactly one community (the communities form a partition). In this talk, we review the Hierarchical Single Linkage Clustering algorithm used in HDBSCAN, and test its application to graph clustering with outliers.
About the speaker
Ryan DeWolfe is a student in the MSc student at Toronto Metropolitan University, and achieved his BSc in mathematics from the University of British Columbia in 2024. His work blends methods from math, statistics, and computer science to develop data science methods for network data, with a focus on principled and efficient algorithms for exploratory data analysis.
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Jan 21, 2026