|
Classification
plays an important role in understanding a set of findings
in archaeology. Some of traditional cluster schemes have been
employed for classification not only in archaeology, but also
in other areas. Almost all of traditional cluster schemes
provide non-overlapping partition of a set as seen in dendrograms.
In archaeology, such non-overlapping partition might cause
misunderstanding of a set of findings. Suppose a situation
that three classes A, B, and C of a family of artefacts have
already been defined. When an artefact belonging to the family
is newly found, we immediately face at a problem to classify
it into which class among A, B, and C. Sometimes, it might
happen that we could find no clear attributes of the artefact
to be classified into a single class, either A or B. In such
case, a reasonable solution is that the artefact should be
classified into two classes A and B; i.e. kind of overlapping
scheme should be introduced. This paper theoretically presents
an overlapping cluster scheme to provide overlapping classes
of a set of findings. A consideration on an artificially defined
set of patterns is also made to illustrate the proposed scheme.
Key words: cluster analysis, overlapping clusters, classification
|
