[R] Help with Clustering Techniques in R

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Christian Hennig wrote:

> Dear Bill,
>
> I think that this is essentially a problem of discriminant analysis or
> logistic regression and not of clustering. That is, you have two groups
> defined by success and failure, and you want to find out how your measures
> are able to distiguish between them.

In pattern-recognition terminology, this is a supervised and not
an unsupervised problem.

> R should be able to carry out such analyses. I don't have the time now
> to figure out exactly how. Background and further references are given e.g. in
> G.J. McLachlan, Discriminant analysis and statistical pattern recognition,
> Wiley, 1992.

That's rather old-fashioned (and was in 1992).  Probably the best
exploratory methods are logistic discrimination and classifcation trees,
methods statisticians used to consistently overlook.

R is very well set up for this sort of thing.  There are several
worked examples in Venables & Ripley (1999) that work with minor
changes (see the online R complements) in R.

>
> Best,
> Christian
>
> On Mon, 27 Aug 2001, Bill Vedder wrote:
>
> > Greetings RListers,
> >
> > I have a data set containing two types of outcomes; success and failure.
> > Associated with each outcome are 12  different measurements.  I'm trying
> > to find out, for example, if some of the 12 measures are associated more
> > with success or failure or, if there's any relationship at all between
> > the measures and the outcomes (success or failure).
> >
> > I don't have (as yet) any experience using clustering techniqes (in R or
> > elsewhere) but thought that they might be applied in this situation.
> >
> > In general, are clustering techniques useful in this situation? Is any
> > techniques better than another?
> >
> > And more specifically, can I use R to determine clustering characterics
> > of the 12 measures and then, for each cluster, have R output whether the
> > cluster is more associated with success or failure?
> >
> > Any help appreciated,
> >
> > Bill Vedder
> >
> >
> >
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>
> ***********************************************************************
> Christian Hennig
> University of Hamburg, Faculty of Mathematics - SPST/ZMS
>  (Schwerpunkt Mathematische Statistik und Stochastische Prozesse,
>  Zentrum fuer Modellierung und Simulation)
> Bundesstrasse 55, D-20146 Hamburg, Germany
> Tel: x40/42838 4907, privat x40/631 62 79
> hennig at math.uni-hamburg.de, http://www.math.uni-hamburg.de/home/hennig/
> #######################################################################
> ich empfehle www.boag.de
>
>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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