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Besides the ado provided by Brendan Halpin for Stata, is there a way to pursue an Optimal Matching using the R-package TraMineR which weights OM’s elementary operations inversely with episode length [1]?

[1]: See Halpin, B. (2010) 'Optimal Matching Analysis and Life-Course Data: The Importance of Duration', Sociological Methods & Research 38(3): 365–388.

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TraMineR does not (yet) compute Duration weighted Optimal Matching Algorithm. Unfortunatly, this distance measure does not garantee the triangular inequality (in French, see chapter 2 of http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/vital/access/manager/Repository/unige:22054). Depending on the distance analysis procedure (clustering) you plan to use, this may be problematic.

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    $\begingroup$ Aren't there some cluster algorithms which do not rely on triangle inequality? Besides, there is a recent master's thesis which presents a modified k-means algorithm without triangle inequality. Maybe, this will be more interesting in the future if someone writes/updates a R-package with this modified k-means. $\endgroup$
    – non-numeric_argument
    May 29, 2013 at 9:15

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