How To Create the Linkage Function

[Bill Denney]

I'm trying to do some clustering analysis.  To do this, I was trying to 
write the linkage function.  It takes in a vector of the distances 
between two points and returns a clustered set of linkages.

The challenge I've come up against is:  the distances are all that is 
passed in.  That is fine for just finding the closest pairs, but when 
you want to join one cluster with a point or another cluster, I don't 
see an easy way to determine the location of a cluster.  What I've found 
so far is that I have to determine a new coordinate space for the 
elements and place each element into that coord space.  I can't think of 
a simple algorithm to place objects into a coordinate space using their 
distances.  Also, since the distances were determined in a generalized 
way, I'm not sure that what I've said above is even correct.

Any pointers?

Bill