
Dear All,

I have several socio-economic and geographic variables for the 27 EU
countries. I would to use these data to derive a correlation matrix between
groups of countries (for a different application).

I thought of using kmeans to cluster the groups, and then calibrate between
group correlations using distances between the centroids, and within group
correlations using distances in a cluster to the own centroid. To calibrate
is to transform a distance to a (positive) correlation coefficient using
some suitable function. Positive correlations reflect the strength of
common tendencies among the countries.

All the above seems crude to me, especially as you have to choice a
transformation function for a distance to a correlation coefficient. Are
there any better methods to do this?

Thanks is advance,
Serguei
	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

