re: st: New command for clustering -clustpop-

["Airey, David C" <david.airey@vanderbilt.edu>]

.

What do other software packages usually do with cluster analyses?

> Thanks to Kit Baum, a new command of interest to -cluster- users has
> been uploaded to ssc.
> 
> Users of -cluster- are no doubt familiar that each run of the command
> on the same data produces different clustering.
> 
> A run of cluster is, in effect, a sample (n=1) from the population of
> possible cluster groupings.
> 
> -clustpop- expands the sample size by running -cluster- many times to
> estimate the population group assignments.  The most frequent group
> assignment is taken as the estimate of the population and a
> statistical test of significance is performed to ensure the lower
> bound of the proportion is greater than 0.5.  In other words, users
> can be confident, at a given alpha level, that this group assignment
> occurs for the majority of cases in the population.  Cases which do no
> meet the criteria are set to missing.
> 
> I expect that most users will prefer this method to using the
> -cluster- command alone.
> 
> - Paul


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