These functions try to improve the presentation of an object of class
dist, matrix, or
data.frame by reordering the rows
and columns such that similar entries are grouped together.
order.dist uses a simple heuristic to solve the TSP problem of
finding an ordering of minimum length (see order.length) for an
object of class dist. Note that the heuristic used is quick but
more elaborate TSP algorithms will produce better orderings.
order.matrix tries to minimize the stress measure of a matrix
(see stress by using the same TSP heuristic as above, once for
the column and once for the row ordering (while the other dimension is
fixed) if by = "both".
order.data.frame uses attributes of type numeric
and logical only, combines them into a normalized matrix and
finds an ordering as above.