[R] Help with clustering

Darin A. England england at cs.umn.edu
Tue Jan 27 22:20:00 CET 2009


Have you tried using the cosine of the angle between two
observations as the similarity measure? If you want to account for
magnitudes, there is something called the jaccard coefficient (if I
remember correctly) that can be used.

Darin

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 10:41:40AM +0100, mauede at alice.it wrote:
> I am going to try out a tentative clustering of some feature vectors.
> The range of values spanned by the three items making up the features vector is quite different:
> 
> Item-1 goes roughly from 70 to 525 (integer numbers only)
> Item-2 is in-between 0 and 1 (all real numbers between 0 and 1)
> Item-3 goes from 1 to 10 (integer numbers only)
> 
> In order to spread out Item-2 even further I might try to replace Item-2 with Log10(Item-2).
> 
> My concern is that, regardless the distance measure used, the item whose order of magnitude is the highest may carry the highest weight in the process of calculating the similarity matrix therefore fading out the influence of the items with smaller variation in the resulting clusters.
> Should I normalize all feature vector elements to 1 in advance of generating the similarity matrix ?
> 
> Thank you so much.
> Maura 
> 
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> tutti i telefonini TIM!
> 
> 
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