R: Recipes for Analysis, Visualization and Machine Learning

Performing cluster analysis using hierarchical clustering

The hclust function in the package stats helps us perform hierarchical clustering.

Getting ready

If you have not already downloaded the data files for this chapter, do it now and ensure that the auto-mpg.csv file is in R's working directory.

We will hierarchically cluster the data based on the variables mpg, cylinders, displacement, horsepower, weight, and acceleration.

How to do it...

To perform cluster analysis using hierarchical clustering, follow these steps:

1. Read the data:

   > auto <- read.csv("auto-mpg.csv")

2. Define a convenience function to standardize the relevant variables and append the resulting variables to the original data:

   rdacb.scale.many <- function (dat, column_nos) { nms <- names(dat) ...