cluster {manynet}

Methods for equivalence clustering

Description

These functions are used to cluster some census object:

• cluster_hierarchical() returns a hierarchical clustering object created by stats::hclust().

• cluster_concor() returns a hierarchical clustering object created from a convergence of correlations procedure (CONCOR).

These functions are not intended to be called directly, but are called within node_equivalence() and related functions. They are exported and listed here to provide more detailed documentation.

Usage

cluster_hierarchical(census, distance)

cluster_concor(.data, census)

Arguments

census

A matrix returned by a ⁠node_by_*()⁠ function.

distance

Character string indicating which distance metric to pass on to stats::dist. By default "euclidean", but other options include "maximum", "manhattan", "canberra", "binary", and "minkowski". Fewer, identifiable letters, e.g. "e" for Euclidean, is sufficient.

.data

An object of a manynet-consistent class:

• matrix (adjacency or incidence) from {base} R

• edgelist, a data frame from {base} R or tibble from {tibble}

• igraph, from the {igraph} package

• network, from the {network} package

• tbl_graph, from the {tidygraph} package

CONCOR

First a matrix of Pearson correlation coefficients between each pair of nodes profiles in the given census is created. Then, again, we find the correlations of this square, symmetric matrix, and continue to do this iteratively until each entry is either 1 or -1. These values are used to split the data into two partitions, with members either holding the values 1 or -1. This procedure from census to convergence is then repeated within each block, allowing further partitions to be found. Unlike UCINET, partitions are continued until there are single members in each partition. Then a distance matrix is constructed from records of in which partition phase nodes were separated, and this is given to stats::hclust() so that dendrograms etc can be returned.

References

Breiger, Ronald L., Scott A. Boorman, and Phipps Arabie. 1975. "An Algorithm for Clustering Relational Data with Applications to Social Network Analysis and Comparison with Multidimensional Scaling". Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 12: 328-83. doi:10.1016/0022-2496(75)90028-0.