[R] finding a stable cluster for kmeans

[Friedrich Leisch]

>>>>> On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 20:16:05 -0400,
>>>>> Wiebke Timm (WT) wrote:

  > You might want to check if there is a neural gas algorithm in R.
  > kmeans generally has a high variance since it is very dependent on  
  > the initialization. Neural gas overcomes this problem by using a  
  > ranked list of neighbouring data points instead using data points  
  > directly. It is more stable (at the cost of additional computational  
  > time).

Neural gas is in package flexclust on CRAN (one of the clustering
methods function cclust() privides).

I also find it more stable than kmeans for some data, although in
general I agree with what has been said before in this thread:
instability is in most cases caused by no clear cluster structure of
the data, wrong number of clusters etc rather than by the wrong
cluster algorithm.

Best,

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Prof. Dr. Friedrich Leisch 

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