R: Unleash Machine Learning Techniques

Modeling and evaluation

Having created our data frame, df, we can begin to develop the clustering algorithms. We will start with hierarchical and then try our hand at k-means. After this, we will need to manipulate our data a little bit to demonstrate how to incorporate mixed data and conduct PAM.

Hierarchical clustering

To build a hierarchical cluster model in R, you can utilize the hclust() function in the base stats package. The two primary inputs needed for the function are a distance matrix and the clustering method. The distance matrix is easily done with the dist() function. For the distance, we will use Euclidean distance. A number of clustering methods are available and the default for hclust() is the complete linkage. We will try this, ...