[R] distance in kmeans algorithm?

Timo Becker timo.becker at oeaw.ac.at
Mon Jul 10 14:51:00 CEST 2006


>
>Hello.
>
>Is it possible to choose the distance in the kmeans algorithm?
>
>I have m vectors of n components and I want to cluster them using kmeans
>algorithm but I want to use the Mahalanobis distance or another distance.
>
>How can I do it in R?
>If I use kmeans, I have no option to choose the distance.
>
>Thanks in advance,
>
>Arnau.
>
>
>  
>
You can use Kmeans from the amap package with several distance measures.

# example for L1 and L2:
x <- matrix(c(0,0,0,1.5,1,-1), ncol=2, byrow=TRUE)
require(amap)
Kmeans(x, x[2:3,], method="manhattan")
Kmeans(x, x[2:3,], method="euclidean")

Cheers,
Timo

-- 
Timo Becker
Phonetics
Austrian Academy of Sciences
Acoustics Research Institute



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