Observations split at the bottom of the dendogram will be much more similar than observations split towards the top. In the dendogram on the left in the image below, observations 9 and 2 appear to be very similar, but when plotted on the right, it is clear that they are not very similar at all. The location of these observations towards the top of the dendogram explain this. 


University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Hierarchical Clustering analysis is presented in the form of a tree based representation of the observations, which is known as a dendrogram. 

A graphical representation of a hierarchical cluster transformed to a dendrogram is pictured below.

Hierarchical Clustering: Dendrograms

James, G., Witten, D., Hastie, T., & Tibshirani, R. (2013). An introduction to statistical learning (Vol. 112, pp. 3-7). New York: springer.

An Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R

The image on the right below represents a dendogram. The left is a different visualization of how to interpret the data. Observations toward the bottom of the data are nested inside observations above it. 



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