dist: Enhanced Distance Matrix Computation and Visualization

In factoextra: Extract and Visualize the Results of Multivariate Data Analyses

Enhanced Distance Matrix Computation and Visualization

Description

Clustering methods classify data samples into groups of similar objects. This process requires some methods for measuring the distance or the (dis)similarity between the observations. Read more: STHDA website - clarifying distance measures..

• get_dist(): Computes a distance matrix between the rows of a data matrix. Compared to the standard dist() function, it supports correlation-based distance measures including "pearson", "kendall" and "spearman" methods.

• fviz_dist(): Visualizes a distance matrix

When stand = TRUE, scaling that produces non-finite values is rejected. fviz_dist() also validates that supplied distance objects contain only finite values before plotting.

Usage

get_dist(x, method = "euclidean", stand = FALSE, ...)

fviz_dist(
  dist.obj,
  order = TRUE,
  show_labels = TRUE,
  lab_size = NULL,
  gradient = list(low = "red", mid = "white", high = "blue")
)

Arguments

x	a numeric matrix or a data frame.
method	the distance measure to be used. This must be one of "euclidean", "maximum", "manhattan", "canberra", "binary", "minkowski", "pearson", "spearman" or "kendall".
stand	logical value; default is FALSE. If TRUE, then the data will be standardized using the function scale(). Measurements are standardized for each variable (column), by subtracting the variable's mean value and dividing by the variable's standard deviation. If scaling produces NA values, get_dist() stops with a package-level error.
...	other arguments to be passed to the function dist() when using get_dist().
dist.obj	an object of class "dist" as generated by the function dist() or get_dist(), containing only finite dissimilarity values.
order	logical value. if TRUE the ordered dissimilarity image (ODI) is shown.
show_labels	logical value. If TRUE, the labels are displayed.
lab_size	the size of labels.
gradient	a list containing three elements specifying the colors for low, mid and high values in the ordered dissimilarity image. The element "mid" can take the value of NULL.

Value

• get_dist(): returns an object of class "dist".

• fviz_dist(): returns a ggplot2

Author(s)

Alboukadel Kassambara [e-mail]

See Also

dist

Examples

data(USArrests)
res.dist <- get_dist(USArrests, stand = TRUE, method = "pearson")

fviz_dist(res.dist, 
   gradient = list(low = "#00AFBB", mid = "white", high = "#FC4E07"))

factoextra documentation built on June 26, 2026, 5:10 p.m.