[R] How to ascertain the number of clusters automatically?

[Fucang Jia]

Hi, everyone,

There is many small cells which can be classified into several big cells 
from the scanned image. K-means clustering does not work well in this 
condition. I have done hierarchical clustering on cells successfully which 
uses shortest distance between classes. The number of clusters is about 3, 
4, 5, 6, 7 generally. One can ascertain the number of clusters visually.  
But because there are thousands of images to be clustered. So it is humdrum 
to me. I want to know if there are any methods that can be used to ascertain 
the number of clusters automatically, especially in this case, only several 
clusters?

Thank you very much!

Best,

Fucang