Fuzzy Analysis Object

DESCRIPTION:
These are objects of class "fanny" They represent a fuzzy clustering of a dataset.


GENERATION:
This class of objects is returned from fanny.


METHODS:
The "fanny" class has methods for the following generic functions: print, summary.


INHERITANCE:
The class "fanny" inherits from "partition". By that, the generic function plot can be used with a fanny object.


STRUCTURE:
A legitimate fanny object is a list with the following components:

objective:
the objective function and the number of iterations the fanny algorithm needed to reach this minimal value.

membership:
matrix containing the memberships for each pair consisting of an object and a cluster.

coeff:
Dunn's partition coefficient F(k) of the clustering, where k is the number of clusters. F(k) is the sum of all squared membership coefficients, divided by the number of objects. Its value is always between 1/k and 1. The normalized form of the coefficient is also given. It is defined as (F(k) - 1/k) / (1 - 1/k), and ranges between 0 and 1. A low value of Dunn's coefficient indicates a very fuzzy clustering, whereas a value close to 1 indicates a near-crisp clustering.

clustering:
the clustering vector of the nearest crisp clustering. A vector with length equal to the number of objects, giving for each object the number of the cluster to which it has the largest membership.

silinfo:
list with all information necessary to construct a silhouette plot of the nearest crisp clustering. The first component is a matrix, with for each object i the cluster to which i belongs, as well as the neighbor cluster of i (the cluster, not containing i, for which the average dissimilarity between its objects and i is minimal), and the silhouette width of i. The other two components give the average silhouette width per cluster and the average silhouette width for the dataset. See plot.partition for more information.

diss:
an object of class "dissimilarity", representing the total dissimilarity matrix of the dataset.


SEE ALSO:
dissimilarity.object , fanny , partition.object , plot.partition .