disscenter: Compute distances to the center of a group
In TraMineR: Trajectory Miner: a Sequence Analysis Toolkit

disscenter

R Documentation

Compute distances to the center of a group

Description

Computes the dissimilarity between objects and their group center from their pairwise dissimilarity matrix.

Usage

disscenter(diss, group=NULL, medoids.index=NULL,
           allcenter = FALSE, weights=NULL, squared=FALSE)

Arguments

`diss`	a dissimilarity matrix such as generated by `seqdist`, or a `dist` object (see `dist`)
`group`	if `NULL` (default), the whole data set is considered. Otherwise a different center is considered for each distinct value of the group variable
`medoids.index`	if `NULL`, returns the dissimilarity to the center. If set to `"first"`, returns the index of the first encountered most central sequence. If `group` is set, an index is returned per group. When set to `"all"`, indexes of all medoids (one list per group) are returned.
`allcenter`	logical. If `TRUE`, computes the distances of all cases to all group centers. Ignored when `medoids.index` is not `NULL`.
`weights`	optional numerical vector containing weights.
`squared`	Logical. If `TRUE` `diss` is squared.

Details

This function computes the dissimilarity between given objects and their group center. It is possible that the group center does not belong to the space formed by the objects (in the same way as the average of integer numbers is not necessarily an integer itself). This distance can also be understood as the contribution to the discrepancy (see dissvar). Note that when the dissimilarity measure does not respect the triangle inequality, the dissimilarity between a given object and its group center may be negative

It can be shown that this dissimilarity is equal to (see Batagelj 1988):

d_{x\tilde{g}}=\frac{1}{n}\big(\sum_{i=1}^{n}d_{xi}-SS\big)

where SS is the sum of squares (see dissvar).

Value

When medoid.index=NULL, the vector with the dissimilarity of each case with its group center or
when allcenter is TRUE, a data frame with distances of all cases (rows) to all group centers (columns).
When medoid.index="first", vector of the index of first encountered medoid per group.
When medoid.index="all", list of indexes of all occurrences of each group medoid.

Author(s)

Matthias Studer (with Gilbert Ritschard for the help page)

References

Studer, M., G. Ritschard, A. Gabadinho and N. S. Müller (2011). Discrepancy analysis of state sequences, Sociological Methods and Research, Vol. 40(3), 471-510, \Sexpr[results=rd]{tools:::Rd_expr_doi("10.1177/0049124111415372")}.

Studer, M., G. Ritschard, A. Gabadinho and N. S. Müller (2010) Discrepancy analysis of complex objects using dissimilarities. In F. Guillet, G. Ritschard, D. A. Zighed and H. Briand (Eds.), Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Management, Studies in Computational Intelligence, Volume 292, pp. 3-19. Berlin: Springer.

Studer, M., G. Ritschard, A. Gabadinho and N. S. Müller (2009) Analyse de dissimilarités par arbre d'induction. In EGC 2009, Revue des Nouvelles Technologies de l'Information, Vol. E-15, pp. 7–18.

Batagelj, V. (1988) Generalized ward and related clustering problems. In H. Bock (Ed.), Classification and related methods of data analysis, Amsterdam: North-Holland, pp. 67–74.

Examples

## Defining a state sequence object
data(mvad)
mvad.seq <- seqdef(mvad[, 17:86])

## Computing dissimilarities (any dissimilarity measure can be used)
mvad.ham <- seqdist(mvad.seq, method="HAM")

## Distance to center according to group gcse5eq
dc <- disscenter(mvad.ham, group=mvad$gcse5eq)

## Ploting distribution of dissimilarity  to center
boxplot(dc~mvad$gcse5eq, col="cyan")

## Retrieving index of the first medoids, one per group
dc <- disscenter(mvad.ham, group=mvad$Grammar, medoids.index="first")
print(dc)

## Retrieving index of all medoids in each group
dc <- disscenter(mvad.ham, group=mvad$Grammar, medoids.index="all")
print(dc)

## Distances of all cases to each group center
dc <- disscenter(mvad.ham, group=mvad$Grammar, allcenter=TRUE)
print(cbind(dc,mvad$Grammar)[1:10,])
## Compare with the following
dc0 <- disscenter(mvad.ham, group=mvad$Grammar)
print(cbind(dc0,mvad$Grammar)[1:10,])

TraMineR documentation built on June 29, 2025, 3:01 p.m.