[R] passing known medoids to clara() in the cluster package

[Dylan Beaudette]

Greetings,

I have had good success using the clara() function to perform a simple cluster 
analysis on a large dataset (1 million+ records with 9 variables). 

Since the clara function is a wrapper to pam(), which will accept known medoid 
data - I am wondering if this too is possible with clara() ... The 
documentation does not suggest that this is possible. 

Essentially I am trying to implement a "supervised classification" of numerous 
geographic data layers. The "unsupervised" approach using clara() works well, 
but I feel the output classes would be more meaningful if I were able to let 
clara() know about the classes that I have in mind.

Is this at all feasible, or am I trying to accomplish something that is not 
possible?

Cheers,


-- 
Dylan Beaudette
Soils and Biogeochemistry Graduate Group
University of California at Davis
530.754.7341