Re: Making sense of data: Clustering OR A coding challenge

For most problems like this, I move over to using a programming language with more context-specific tools like R. At least a dozen clustering methods are available and there are facilities for estimating the "true" number of clusters. Using it is fairly simple from perl. Just write a little script that you call from the command line that reads a file of numbers that you supply. The output can be graphical or some numeric summary--whatever suits your needs. You can also use the perl module, Statistics::R to interact without the intermediate running of an R script from the commmand line.

Sean

Comment on Re: Making sense of data: Clustering OR A coding challenge

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Re^2: Making sense of data: Clustering OR A coding challenge by Win (Novice) on Apr 04, 2006 at 10:16 UTC
I am quite interested in this. Can you please offer Perl scripts that does this by way of example. Are the graphs that you get from R really much better than Excel? Is there a web page that demonstrates that graphical capabilities of R?	[reply]
Re^3: Making sense of data: Clustering OR A coding challenge by marto (Cardinal) on Apr 04, 2006 at 10:25 UTC
"Is there a web page that demonstrates that graphical capabilities of R?" Did you look at the website that srdst13 links to in his post Re: Making sense of data: Clustering OR A coding challenge? There is screenshot link on the menu, which, oddly enough, displays graphical examples. Martin	[reply]
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Re^3: Making sense of data: Clustering OR A coding challenge by srdst13 (Pilgrim) on Apr 05, 2006 at 01:06 UTC
"Is there a web page that demonstrates that graphical capabilities of R?" For graphical examples using R, check out this website. If there are any questions as to whether R can generate better graphs than Excel, that website should answer them. Sean	[reply]