Density-based data analysis and similarity search

Similarity search in database systems is becoming an increasingly important task in modern application domains such as multimedia, molecular biology, medical imaging, computer-aided engineering, marketing and purchasing assistance as well as many others. Furthermore, the feature transformations and distance measures used in similarity search build the foundation of sophisticated data analysis and mining techniques. In this chapter, we show how visualizing cluster hierarchies describing a database of objects can aid the user in the timeconsuming task to find similar objects and discover interesting patterns.