treeClust: An R Package for Tree-Based Clustering Dissimilarities
Samuel,E. Buttrey, R. Whitaker Lyn · The R Journal · 2015
This paper describes treeClust, an R package that produces dissimilarities useful for clustering.These dissimilarities arise from a set of classification or regression trees, one with each variable in the data acting in turn as a the response, and all others as predictors.This use of trees produces dissimilarities that are insensitive to scaling, benefit from automatic variable selection, and appear to perform well.The software allows a number of options to be set, affecting the set of objects returned in the call; the user can also specify a clustering algorithm and, optionally, return only the clustering vector.The package can also generate a numeric data set whose inter-point distances relate to the treeClust ones; such a numeric data set can be much smaller than the vector of inter-point dissimilarities, a useful feature in big data sets.