[R] kmeans() compared to PROC FASTCLUS

[Georg Ruß]

On 02/12/10 17:49:37, Andrew Agrimson wrote:
> I've been comparing results from kmeans() in R to PROC FASTCLUS in SAS
> and I'm getting drastically different results with a real life data set.
> [...] Has anybody looked into the differences in the implementations or
> have any thoughts on the matter?

Hi Andrew,

as per the website below, it looks as if PROC FASTCLUS is implementing a
certain flavor of k-Means:

http://www.technion.ac.il/docs/sas/stat/chap27/sect2.htm

As per the manpage ?kmeans, the R implementation of k-Means has the option
to set one of the algorithms explicitly:

algorithm = c("Hartigan-Wong", "Lloyd", "Forgy", "MacQueen"))

I don't know whether you've tried that, but you may start by setting these
algorithm variants explicitly and see what the outcome is.

Regards,
Georg.
-- 
Research Assistant
Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg
research at georgruss.de
http://research.georgruss.de