[R] Multidimensional scaling

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, John Miyamoto wrote:

> A student of mine wants to use R to do some nonmetric multidimensional
> scaling.  According to the R FAQ, there's a package called pcurve that
> computes multidimensional scaling solutions, but I was not able to locate
> it the contrib page (I am a Windows user with R version 1.4.1).  Can
> anyone tell me whether it is possible to do nonmetric multidimensional
> scaling with R, and if so, how?

pcurve fails make pkgcheck on Windows, *as mentioned in the ReadMe on that
page on CRAN*.  Its isomds function is a tiny variant of a copy of an older
vsersion of my isoMDS function in package MASS (and the rest of it seems
based on princurve or is yet another PCA function: there are already three
others available for R).

There are several other possibilities, cmdscale{mva}, sammon{MASS},
isoMDS{MASS} and xgvis{xgobi} all having some merits.  `nonmetric MDS' is
like `nonlinear models': it tells you what it is not (and even then the
term `metric MDS' is not always used in the same sense).

-- 
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


-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._