Message-ID: <40B71760.60201@hhbio.wasser.tu-dresden.de>
Date: 2004-05-28T10:41:36Z
From: Thomas Petzoldt
Subject: distance in the function kmeans
In-Reply-To: <HYEYIN$999344BCC451662F160AA62400532F59@laposte.net>
n.bouget wrote:
> Hi,
> I want to know which distance is using in the function kmeans
> and if we can change this distance.
> Indeed, in the function pam, we can put a distance matrix in
> parameter (by the line "pam<-pam(dist(matrixdata),k=7)" ) but
> we can't do it in the function kmeans, we have to put the
> matrix of data directly ...
> Thanks in advance,
> Nicolas BOUGET
One solution is to transform the data in a way, that the euclidean
distance of the transformed values represents some other distance of the
original values. This works at least for the Mahalanobis-Distance, when
one applies a multivariate technique to a PCA transformed and re-scaled
matrix, but I don't know if there are transformations for some other
distance measures.
Thomas P.