Graphing Data with R

Chapter 19. Clustering: Dendrograms and Heat Maps

Clustering

Clustering refers to a number of related methods for exploring multivariate data. There are dozens of clustering functions available in R. We will focus on just one of them in this chapter: the hclust() function in base R. This function performs hierarchical clustering, which is one of the most commonly used clustering techniques and will be a good introduction to clustering in general. The idea is to put observations into clusters, or groups, in which the members of a single cluster are similar to each other and different from observations in other clusters. Further, a particular cluster may be judged to be similar, in varying degrees, to other clusters. We will use a graph called the dendrogram—which looks like an inverted tree—to understand the relationships of clusters to one another. Figure 19-2, later in this chapter, presents an example of a dendrogram.)

Consider the mtcars dataset from Motor Trend Magazine’s 1974 report on the characteristics of a number of new models for that year. Let’s take a look at the first six rows of this dataset by using the head() function:

 > head(mtcars) mpg cyl disp hp drat wt qsec vs am Mazda RX4 21.0 6 160 110 3.90 2.620 16.46 0 1 Mazda RX4 Wag 21.0 6 160 110 3.90 2.875 17.02 0 1 Datsun 710 22.8 4 108 93 3.85 2.320 18.61 1 1 Hornet 4 Drive 21.4 6 258 110 3.08 3.215 19.44 1 0 Hornet Sportabout 18.7 8 360 175 3.15 3.440 17.02 0 0 Valiant 18.1 6 225 105 2.76 3.460 20.22 1 0 gear ...