[R] hclust, does order of data matter?

[Peter Langfelder]

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 2:07 PM, rchowdhury <rchowdhury at alumni.upenn.edu> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I am using the hclust function to cluster some data.  I have two separate
> files with the same data.  The only difference is the order of the data in
> the file.  For some reason, when I run the two files through the hclust
> function, I get two completely different results.
>
> Does anyone know why this is happening?  Does the order of the data matter?

No, order of the data should not matter. However, hclust takes a
distance structure, not a matrix, so the problem may be in how you
create the distance. Can you provide an example?

Peter