APPARATUS AND ACCOMPANYING METHODS FOR VISUALIZING CLUSTERS OF DATA AND HIERARCHICAL CLUSTER CLASSIFICATIONS

A system that incorporates an interactive graphical user interface for visualizing clusters (categories) and segments (summarized clusters) of data. Specifically, the system automatically categorizes incoming case data into clusters, summarizes those clusters into segments, determines similarity measures for the segments, scores the selected segments through the similarity measures, and then forms and visually depicts hierarchical organizations of those selected clusters. The system also automatically and dynamically reduces, as necessary, a depth of the hierarchical organization, through elimination of unnecessary hierarchical levels and inter-nodal links, based on similarity measures of segments or segment groups. Attribute/value data that tends to meaningfully characterize each segment is also scored, rank ordered based on normalized scores, and then graphically displayed. The system permits a user to browse through the hierarchy, and, to readily comprehend segment inter-relationships, selectively expand and contract the displayed hierarchy, as desired, as well as to compare two selected segments or segment groups together and graphically display the results of that comparison. An alternative discriminant-based cluster scoring technique is also presented.