Dear R users,
 
I'm interested in measuring the stability of a heirarchical clustering, of
the overall clustering and finding sub clusters (from cutting the
heirarchical clustering at different levels) which demonstrate stability. 
I saw some postings on the R help from a while back about bootstrapping for
clustering (using sample and generating a consesus tree with a web based
tool CONSENSE) but i wondered if there have been any advances on the
"bootstrapping clustering" front? 
In terms of finding stability in sub sections of the clustering I'm thinking
of modifying the jaccard function from prabclus to look at pairwise
similarities in different cluster partitions of sub-samples of the data,
with high similarity being indicative of stability. 
I wondered if anyone has already looked at stability measures for clustering
(particularly thos which interface with hclust), and if any are available
already in R but i have just missed them?
 
I realise there are problems with heirarchical clustering..and i may have to
consider using a different method,
 
thanks for your advice,
 
Jacqueline Hall

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