Date:         Wed, 21 Sep 2005 06:40:39 -0700
Reply-To:     pa pa <ctll04@YAHOO.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         pa pa <ctll04@YAHOO.COM>
Subject:      Cluster node for classification purpose
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

Hi there,
In the SAS Enterprise Miner, there is clustering node. I would like to use it for classification. My dataset has a target variable with 5 classes/values (A,B,C,D and E). I fed the dataset into the Cluster node.

However, it only group the inputs into groups. But this grouping is not same as the target attribute which consists of 5 classes (I know clustering is un-supervised learning, and it doesnt need to know the labels of the training set ). Particularly, theere are more than 5 clusters generated.

Q1: How can I know which class (A,B,C,D,E) a cluster belongs to?

Q2: Is that true the clustering techniques assume the distribution of A,B,C,D and E during training. So if the test set (after finish training) does not follow this assumed distribution, the clustering technique will not work properly?

Thanks
Have a nice day
Patrick Tran



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