Published in

University of California, Los Angeles, Journal of Statistical Software, 12(47)

DOI: 10.18637/jss.v047.i12

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

tclust: An R Package for a Trimming Approach to Cluster Analysis

Journal article published in 2012 by Heinrich Fritz, Luis A. Garcia Escudero, Agustin Mayo-Iscar ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

Full text: Download

Question mark in circle
Preprint: policy unknown
Question mark in circle
Postprint: policy unknown
Question mark in circle
Published version: policy unknown
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Outlying data can heavily influence standard clustering methods. At the same time, clustering principles can be useful when robustifying statistical procedures. These two reasons motivate the development of feasible robust model-based clustering approaches. With this in mind, an R package for performing non-hierarchical robust clustering, called tclust, is presented here. Instead of trying to "fit" noisy data, a proportion α of the most outlying observations is trimmed. The tclust package efficiently handles different cluster scatter constraints. Graphical exploratory tools are also provided to help the user make sensible choices for the trimming proportion as well as the number of clusters to search for.