nselectboot: Selection of the number of clusters via bootstrap

In fpc: Flexible Procedures for Clustering

Selection of the number of clusters via bootstrap

Description

Selection of the number of clusters via bootstrap as explained in Fang and Wang (2012). Several times 2 bootstrap samples are drawn from the data and the number of clusters is chosen by optimising an instability estimation from these pairs.

In principle all clustering methods can be used that have a CBI-wrapper, see clusterboot, kmeansCBI. However, the currently implemented classification methods are not necessarily suitable for all of them, see argument classification.

Usage

nselectboot(data,B=50,distances=inherits(data,"dist"),
                        clustermethod=NULL,
                        classification="averagedist",centroidname = NULL,
                        krange=2:10, count=FALSE,nnk=1,
                        largeisgood=FALSE,...)

Arguments

data	something that can be coerced into a matrix. The data matrix - either an n*p-data matrix (or data frame) or an n*n-dissimilarity matrix (or dist-object).
B	integer. Number of resampling runs.
distances	logical. If TRUE, the data is interpreted as dissimilarity matrix. If data is a dist-object, distances=TRUE automatically, otherwise distances=FALSE by default. This means that you have to set it to TRUE manually if data is a dissimilarity matrix.
clustermethod	an interface function (the function name, not a string containing the name, has to be provided!). This defines the clustering method. See the "Details"-section of clusterboot and kmeansCBI for the format. Clustering methods for nselectboot must have a k-argument for the number of clusters and must otherwise follow the specifications in clusterboot. Note that nselectboot won't work with CBI-functions that implicitly already estimate the number of clusters such as pamkCBI; use claraCBI if you want to run it for pam/clara clustering.
classification	string. This determines how non-clustered points are classified to given clusters. Options are explained in classifdist (if distances=TRUE) and classifnp (otherwise). Certain classification methods are connected to certain clustering methods. classification="averagedist" is recommended for average linkage, classification="centroid" is recommended for k-means, clara and pam (with distances it will work with claraCBI only), classification="knn" with nnk=1 is recommended for single linkage and classification="qda" is recommended for Gaussian mixtures with flexible covariance matrices.
centroidname	string. Indicates the name of the component of CBIoutput$result that contains the cluster centroids in case of classification="centroid", where CBIoutput is the output object of clustermethod. If clustermethod is kmeansCBI or claraCBI, centroids are recognised automatically if centroidname=NULL. If centroidname=NULL and distances=FALSE, cluster means are computed as the cluster centroids.
krange	integer vector; numbers of clusters to be tried.
count	logical. If TRUE, numbers of clusters and bootstrap runs are printed.
nnk	number of nearest neighbours if classification="knn", see classifdist (if distances=TRUE) and classifnp (otherwise).
largeisgood	logical. If TRUE, output component stabk is taken as one minus the original instability value so that larger values of stabk are better.
...	arguments to be passed on to the clustering method.

Value

nselectboot returns a list with components kopt,stabk,stab.

kopt	optimal number of clusters.
stabk	mean instability values for numbers of clusters (or one minus this if largeisgood=TRUE).
stab	matrix of instability values for all bootstrap runs and numbers of clusters.

Author(s)

Christian Hennig [e-mail] https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/christian.hennig/en/

References

Fang, Y. and Wang, J. (2012) Selection of the number of clusters via the bootstrap method. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, 56, 468-477.

See Also

classifdist, classifnp, clusterboot,kmeansCBI

Examples

  
  set.seed(20000)
  face <- rFace(50,dMoNo=2,dNoEy=0,p=2)
  nselectboot(dist(face),B=2,clustermethod=disthclustCBI,
   method="average",krange=5:7)
  nselectboot(dist(face),B=2,clustermethod=claraCBI,
   classification="centroid",krange=5:7)
  nselectboot(face,B=2,clustermethod=kmeansCBI,
   classification="centroid",krange=5:7)
# Of course use larger B in a real application.

fpc documentation built on Sept. 24, 2024, 9:07 a.m.