Thanks for the clarification Christian. For future people who will search, I did eventually found a way to do Kmeans with manhattan distances, by using: the "cclust" command (from the cclust package)
(where the parameter to change is "dist": dist- If "euclidean", then mean square error, if "manhattan ", the mean absolute error is used ) Thanks again, Tal On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 1:25 PM, Christian Hennig <chr...@stats.ucl.ac.uk>wrote: > Dear Tal, > > pam is not in the fpc package but in the cluster package. Look at ?pam and > ?pam.object to find out what it does. > As far as I see, the medoids in the output object are the final cluster > medoids, not the initial ones, which presumably explains the observed > behaviour. > > Best regards, > Christian > > > On Wed, 17 Dec 2008, Tal Galili wrote: > > Hello all. >> I wish to run k-means with "manhattan" distance. >> Since this is not supported by the function "kmeans", I turned to the >> "pam" >> function in the "fpc" package. >> Yet, when I tried to have the algorithm run with different starting >> points, >> I found that pam ignores and keep on starting the algorithm from the same >> starting-points (medoids). >> >> For my questions: >> 1) is there a bug in the code or in the way I am using it ? >> 2) is there a way to either fix the code or to another function in some >> package that can run kmeans with manhattan distance (manhattan distances >> are >> the sum of absolute differences) ? >> >> here is a sample code: >> require(fpc) >> x <- rbind(cbind(rnorm(10,0,0.5), rnorm(10,0,0.5)), >> cbind(rnorm(15,5,0.5), rnorm(15,5,0.5))) >> pam(x, 2, medoids = c(1,16)) >> >> >> output: >> Medoids: >> ID >> [1,] 3 -0.1406026 0.1131493 >> [2,] 17 4.9564839 4.6480520 >> ... >> >> So the initial medeoids where 3 and 17, not 1 and 16 as I asked. >> >> >> >> Thanks, >> Tal >> >> >> >> -- >> ---------------------------------------------- >> Tal Galili >> Phone number: 972-50-3373767 >> FaceBook: Tal Galili >> My Blogs: >> www.talgalili.com >> www.biostatistics.co.il >> >> > *** --- *** > Christian Hennig > University College London, Department of Statistical Science > Gower St., London WC1E 6BT, phone +44 207 679 1698 > chr...@stats.ucl.ac.uk, www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucakche > -- ---------------------------------------------- Tal Galili Phone number: 972-50-3373767 FaceBook: Tal Galili My Blogs: www.talgalili.com www.biostatistics.co.il [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.