Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T20:18:50.429Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cluster Analysis: A Brief Discussion of Some of the Problems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

B. S. Everitt
B. S. Everitt*
Affiliation:
Biometrics Unit, Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, De Crespigny Park, Denmark Hill, London, S.E.5
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the last two years psychiatrists, amongst others, have become aware of the technique of cluster analysis, and having obviously decided that this technique may be useful have applied it to sets of data (e.g. Pilowsky et al., 1969; Paykel, 1970), and in some cases drawn conclusions about the results. This paper will attempt to point out some of the problems of this type of analysis, in the hope that in the future casual users of the technique may be more aware of its possible pitfalls.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 120 , Issue 555 , February 1972 , pp. 143 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1972 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Boulton, D. M., and Wallace, C. S. (1970). ‘A program for numerical classification.’ The Computer Journal, 13, 63–9.Google Scholar
Everitt, B. S. (1971). ‘An investigation of the methods of cluster analysis.’ (Submitted to Applied Statistics.) Google Scholar
Everitt, B. S., Gourlay, A. J., and Kendell, R. E. (1971). ‘An attempt at validation of traditional psychiatric syndromes by cluster analysis.’ British Journal of Psychiatry. 119, 399–412.Google Scholar
Fleiss, J. L., and Zubin, J. (1969). ‘On the methods and theory of clustering.’ Multivariate Behavioural Research, 4, 235–50.Google Scholar
Friedman, H. P., and Rubin, J. (1967). ‘On some invariant criteria for grouping data.’ Journal of the American Statistical Association, 62, 1159–78.Google Scholar
Gower, J. C. (1967). ‘A comparison of some methods of cluster analysis.’ Biometrics, 23, 623–7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
MacQueen, J. (1966). ‘Some methods for classification and analysis of multivariate observations.’ Proc. of the 5th Berkely Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability. University of California Press.Google Scholar
Paykel, E. S. (1971). ‘Classification of depressed patients: a cluster-analysis-derived grouping.’ British Journal of Psychiatry, 118, 275.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pilowsky, I., Levine, S., and Boulton, D. M. (1969). ‘The classification of depression by numerical taxonomy.’ British Journal of Psychiatry, 115, 937–45.Google Scholar
Ward, J. H. (1963). ‘Hierarchical grouping to optimize an objective function.’ American Statistical Association Journal, 236–44.Google Scholar
Wolfe, J. H. (1970). ‘Pattern clustering by multivariate mixture analysis.’ Multivariate Behavioral Research, 5, 329–50.Google Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.