Comparative Assessment of Hierarchical Clustering Methods for Grouping in Singular Spectrum Analysis

Singular spectrum analysis (SSA) is a popular filtering and forecasting method that is used in a wide range of fields such as time series analysis and signal processing. A commonly used approach to identify the meaningful components of a time series in the grouping step of SSA is the utilization of the visual information of eigentriples. Another supplementary approach is that of employing an algorithm that performs clustering based on the dissimilarity matrix defined by weighted correlation between the components of a time series. The SSA literature search revealed that no investigation has compared the various clustering methods. The aim of this paper was to compare the effectiveness of different hierarchical clustering linkages to identify the appropriate groups in the grouping step of SSA. The comparison was performed based on the corrected Rand (CR) index as a comparison criterion that utilizes various simulated series. It was also demonstrated via two real-world time series how one can proceed, step-by-step, to conduct grouping in SSA using a hierarchical clustering method. This paper is supplemented with accompanying R codes.