[R] CLARA and determining the right number of clusters

2008-09-30 Thread pacomet
Hi everyone I have a question about clustering. I've managed using CLARA to get a clustering analysis of a large data set. But now I want to find which is the right number of clusters. The clara.object gives some information like the ratio between maximal and minimal dissimilarity that says

Re: [R] CLARA and determining the right number of clusters

2008-09-30 Thread Christian Hennig
Hi there, generally finding the right number of clusters is a difficult problem and depends heavily on the cluster concept needed for the particular application. No outcome of any automatic mathod should be taken for granted. Having said that, I guess that something like the example given in

Re: [R] CLARA and determining the right number of clusters

2008-09-30 Thread pacomet
Hi Christian and thanks I've tried your suggestion and it seems promising. But I have a couple of questions. I am reading a three column ASCII file (lon, lat, sst) mydata - read.table(INFILE, header=FALSE,sep=, na.strings=99.00,dec=.,strip.white=TRUE,col.names=c(lon,lat,sst)) then I extract a

Re: [R] CLARA and determining the right number of clusters

2008-09-30 Thread Christian Hennig
Hi there, I've tried your suggestion and it seems promising. But I have a couple of questions. I am reading a three column ASCII file (lon, lat, sst) mydata - read.table(INFILE, header=FALSE,sep=, na.strings=99.00,dec=.,strip.white=TRUE,col.names=c(lon,lat,sst)) then I extract a subset of