39 views

### R daisy - Gower distance, different values with different number of observations [duplicate]

I have a mixed data set where I want to compute distances between observations with Gower in R (daisy function). When I compute distances between different number of observations, the distances seem ...
18 views

### Is it correct to use “Ward.D2” 's method of R's hclust function with a Gower distance matrix? [duplicate]

I have mixed type variables (3 quantitative and 3 qualitative) and I calculated Gower's dissimilarity distance between my objects. I wanted to do a hierarchical clustering with hclust, but I am not ...
94k views

### Why does k-means clustering algorithm use only Euclidean distance metric?

Is there a specific purpose in terms of efficiency or functionality why the k-means algorithm does not use for example cosine (dis)similarity as a distance metric, but can only use the Euclidean norm? ...
49k views

### Choosing the right linkage method for hierarchical clustering

I am performing hierarchical clustering on data I've gathered and processed from the reddit data dump on Google BigQuery. My process is the following: Get the latest 1000 posts in /r/politics ...
46k views

### Clustering of mixed type data with R

I wonder whether it is possible to perform within R a clustering of data having mixed data variables. In other words I have a data set containing both numerical and categorical variables within and I'...
41k views

### Doing principal component analysis or factor analysis on binary data

I have a dataset with a large number of Yes/No responses. Can I use principal components (PCA) or any other data reduction analyses (such as factor analysis) for this type of data? Please advise how I ...
26k views

### How to use both binary and continuous variables together in clustering?

I need to use binary variables (values 0 & 1) in k-means. But k-means only works with continuous variables. I know some people still use these binary variables in k-means ignoring the fact that k-...
14k views

### What is the optimal distance function for individuals when attributes are nominal?

I do not know which distance function between individuals to use in case of nominal (unordered categorical) attributes. I was reading some textbook and they suggest Simple Matching function but some ...
30k views

### Clustering with categorical and numeric data [duplicate]

I frequently come across data sets that have both categorical and numeric data. I think this is just a fact of life where the data is not all in one category. I'm basically trying to find some ...
18k views

### How does the Gower distance calculate the difference between binary variables'?

I have 17 numeric and 5 binary (0-1) variables, with 73 samples in my dataset. I need to run a cluster analysis. I know that the Gower distance is a good metric for datasets with mixed variables. ...
7k views

### Can binary data be ordinal?

Binary data is often mentioned as a nominal sub-category, especially in such examples as female/male, smoker/non-smoker, etc. However, binary data with such values as pass/fail, correct/incorrect, ...
12k views

### Gower's (dis)similarity index

I would like to ask a question about Gower similarity/dissimilarity index. Is it ok to use the Gower dissimilarity measure with Ward linkage clustering? I was reading that the Gower similarity index ...
6k views

### Robust cluster method for mixed data in R

I'm looking to cluster a small data set (64 observations of 4 interval variables and a single three-factor categorical variable). Now, I'm quite new to cluster analysis, but I am aware that there has ...
4k views

### Convert categorical data to numerical data to compute a distance then

I want to calculate euclidean distances for a dataset I have. However, there are two attributes which are not numbers. One attribute is country(10 different countries), the other one is race(3 races). ...
5k views

### Ask for suggestions on clustering methods on a large dataset with mixed types of variables

I need to build segmentation on a large customer dataset with more than 300K records and many variables, including continuous like income and age, ordinal like education level and membership level, ...
2k views

### Ecological mixed data cluster analysis: Transformations required? Use K-means or hierarchical methods?

I am trying to identify habitat types from 85 plots. I intend to do a cluster analysis to identify habitat types, and hope to fit additional plots into the identified clusters. (For context, I took ...
3k views

### How to derive a distance function based on multiple variables for cluster analysis?

I am not a statistician, so please excuse my lack of statistics knowledge/terminology. I have bunch of network nodes that I want to run cluster analysis on and identify clusters. So as far as I ...
1k views

### Clustering numeric, categorical, and multivalue categorical data

I have data that look like this: ...
2k views

### coding survey data for cosine similarity and euclidean distance?

I want to know how to code survey data such that a similarity function can be applied on it. Say I want to use cosine similarity. All the search results and QA I've found while in my search deal only ...
2k views

### Distance metric for categorical and numerical data

I have asked a related question in mathematics section, but I think here is a better place to ask. for both KNN algorithm (classification) and k-means algorithm (clustering), there is a need for a ...
1k views

### How Gower's dissimilarity handle missing values in numeric columns?

I would like to ask a question about Gower dissimilarity, I was wondering how Gower measure handle missing values in numeric columns, especially that Gower standardized each column based on the range ...
751 views

### Gower's (dis)similarity: How are numeric values scaled?

I am trying to understand the concept of Gower's (dis)similarity measure and I have problems to understand the scaling method for numeric variables. Are numeric values just scaled between 0 and 1 ...
651 views

### Clustering Data Using Gower and Kmeans

I am trying to do clustering on my data which consists of both categorical and continuous variables. I have some questions which I would like to ask: I am going to use the Gower Distance measure to ...
450 views

### How to compute the centroid of a cluster for Gower distances

I'd like to assess how scattered a cluster of binary vectors $X_j$ is, and as I understand the conventional way for doing this is: $$S = \frac{1}{T} \sum_{j}^{T}\|X_j-A_j\|_p,$$ where $A_j$ is the ...
531 views

### Clustering variables of mixed types in R [duplicate]

I need to analyse questionnaire survey data with mixed data types (nominal, ordinal, continuous). I want to cluster the variables. So far I only have dead ends. I know I can use daisy in the cluster ...
392 views

### Cluster analysis in SPSS

I started learning cluster analysis (using SPSS) and I need some help in a practical problem. Given the following variables: The respondents were asked to indicate the importance of the following ...
274 views

### Clustering on a data set with mixed variables [duplicate]

I have a data set consisting of $n$ elements with $d$ features for each element ($x_{i,f}$ means the value for the f-th feature of the i-th element). I would like to cluster this data set into $k$ ...
119 views

### Clustering patients according to biomarkers: an easy way out?

I've just started reading about clustering and classification. It's a djungle, a fascinating one. Currently, however I have a rather urgent task, i.e to perform a sort of cluster analysis in the sense ...
182 views

### Clustering with respect to multiple metrics

Hierarchal clustering methods as well as some others such as DBSCAN use a notion of (dis-)similarity between data points to cluster the data. Such dissimilarity can be formalized by the mathematical ...
158 views

### Non-parametric Clustering for mixed-type data

Currently I am studying Cluster Analysis where I am going through the TwoStep clustering method found in SPSS (it is a futher developed BIRCH method). Does anyone know what can be used as an ...
101 views

### FindSimilar items in a complex dataset

Im a MachineLearning newbie, but I want to learn more about this interesting topic using a practical example, on which I would appreciate any theoretical and practical help: I have a database of "...