Silhouette plot in R

Question

I have a set of data containing: item, associated cluster, silhouette coefficient. I can further augment this data set with more information if necessary.

I would li

Answer 1

Function silhouette in package cluster can do the plots for you. It just needs a vector of cluster membership (produced from whatever algorithm you choose) and a dissimilarity matrix (probably best to use the same one used in producing the clusters). For example:

library (cluster)
library (vegan)
data(varespec)
dis = vegdist(varespec)
res = pam(dis,3) # or whatever your choice of clustering algorithm is
sil = silhouette (res$clustering,dis) # or use your cluster vector
windows() # RStudio sometimes does not display silhouette plots correctly
plot(sil)

EDIT: For k-means (which uses squared Euclidean distance)

library (vegan)
library (cluster)
data(varespec)
dis = dist(varespec)^2
res = kmeans(varespec,3)
sil = silhouette (res$cluster, dis)
windows() 
plot(sil)