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clue (version 0.3-27)

pam: K-Medoids Partitions of Clusterings

Description

Compute $k$-medoids partitions of clusterings.

Usage

cl_pam(x, k, method = "euclidean", solver = c("pam", "kmedoids"))

Arguments

x
an ensemble of partitions or hierarchies, or something coercible to that (see cl_ensemble).
k
an integer giving the number of classes to be used in the partition.
method
a character string or a function, as for argument method of function cl_dissimilarity.
solver
a character string indicating the $k$-medoids solver to be employed. May be abbreviated. If "pam" (default), the Partitioning Around Medoids (Kaufman & Rousseeuw (1990), Chapter 2) heuristic

Value

  • An object of class "cl_pam" representing the obtained secondary partition, which is a list with the following components.
  • clusterthe class ids of the partition.
  • medoid_idsthe indices of the medoids.
  • prototypesa cluster ensemble with the $k$ prototypes (medoids).
  • criterionthe value of the criterion function of the partition.
  • descriptiona character string indicating the dissimilarity method employed.

Details

An optimal $k$-medoids partition of the given cluster ensemble is defined as a partition of the objects $x_i$ (the elements of the ensemble) into $k$ classes $C_1, \ldots, C_k$ such that the criterion function $L = \sum_{l=1}^k \min_{j \in C_l} \sum_{i \in C_l} d(x_i, x_j)$ is minimized.

Such secondary partitions (e.g., Gordon & Vichi, 1998) are obtained by computing the dissimilarities $d$ of the objects in the ensemble for the given dissimilarity method, and applying a dissimilarity-based $k$-medoids solver to $d$.

References

L. Kaufman and P. J. Rousseeuw (1990). Finding Groups in Data: An Introduction to Cluster Analysis. Wiley, New York. A. D. Gordon and M. Vichi (1998). Partitions of partitions. Journal of Classification, 15, 265--285.

See Also

cl_pclust for more general prototype-based partitions of clusterings.

Examples

Run this code
data("Kinship82")
party <- cl_pam(Kinship82, 3, "symdiff")
## Compare results with tables 5 and 6 in Gordon & Vichi (1998).
party
lapply(cl_prototypes(party), cl_classes)
table(cl_class_ids(party))

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