[R] distance in the function kmeans

[Thomas Petzoldt]

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.