From the course: R Essential Training Part 2: Modeling Data

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Grouping cases with hierarchical clustering

Grouping cases with hierarchical clustering

From the course: R Essential Training Part 2: Modeling Data

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Grouping cases with hierarchical clustering

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- [Tutor] In marketing and medicine, and so many other applied domains, one of the most important questions is, "What cases, what people, what organizations go with whom?" If you're in marketing, you may want to send out the same appeals to similar groups of people. If you're in medicine, you want to find out which patients are similar to one another. So you can make a better prognosis and treatment plan. Underlying both of these is, cluster analysis, the idea that you want to take the data that you have, and based on that data, find out which cases are most similar to one another. Now, the important thing about this is, there's judgment calls in this one, because similar is a psychological concept, it's a construct. And there are many different ways of going about that. I want to show you one of the most flexible is called Hierarchical Clustering. Now to do this, I'm going to load a few packages, including one…

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