Dear Weiwei,
your question sounds a bit too general and complicated for the R-list.
Perhaps you should look for personal statistical advice.
The quality of methods (and especially distance choice) for down-sampling
ceratinly depends on the structure of the data set. I do not see at the moment why
you need any down-sampling at all, and you should find out first if and
why it's a good thing to do (by whatever method).
An obvious candidate for a clustering algorithm would be pam/clara in
package cluster, because this approach chooses points already in the data
set as cluster centroids (and produces therefore a proper subsample),
which does not apply to most other clustering methods.
However, in
C. Hennig and L. J. Latecki: The choice of vantage objects for image
retrieval. Pattern Recognition 36 (2003), 2187-2196.
the clustering approach has been clearly outperformed by some stepwise
selection approaches for down-sampling - admittedly in a different kind of
problem, but I think that the reasons for this may apply also to your
situation,
You can compare different clusterings (or choices of a subset) by
cross-validation or
bootstrap applied to the resulting decision tree in the classification
problem.
Best,
Christian
On Mon, 25 Jul 2005, Weiwei Shi wrote:
Dear listers:
Here I have a question on clustering methods available in R. I am
trying to down-sampling the majority class in a classification problem
on an imbalanced dataset. Since I don't want to lose information in
the original dataset, I don't want to use naive down-sampling: I think
using clustering on the majority class' side to select
"representative" samples might help. So, my question is, which
clustering method should be tested to get the best result. I think the
key thing might be the selection of "distance" considering the next
step in which I would like to use decision trees.
Please share your experience in using clustering (Any available
implementation outside R is also welcome)
weiwei
--
Weiwei Shi, Ph.D
"Did you always know?"
"No, I did not. But I believed..."
---Matrix III