Cluster analysis

[grime]

I have the user enter up to 20 locations, to which are associated coordinates.

I would like Excel to be able to identify groups of locations based on their proximity to each other.

So if 5 of those "locations" are within a certain distance from one another, Excel would assign a group number to those 5, and so on with all 20 locations.

Can anyone point me into the right direction? Is this problem too difficult for wittle ol' Excel?

[Jerry W. Lewis]

Excel, particularly with VBA is a quite handy numerical computation
platform that is more than capable of handling the calculations.
However there are no native functions that already implement the
algorithms. If you don't want to do some programming, then you might
look into some of the commercial statistical add-ins, or perhaps use R,
which is an open source implementation of the S statistical language
www.r-project.org.
There is even an interfact that allows R to be called from Excel
http://cran.r-project.org/contrib/ex...m/RSrv135.html

Jerry

grime wrote:

> I have the user enter up to 20 locations, to which are associated
> coordinates.
>
> I would like Excel to be able to identify groups of locations based on
> their proximity to each other.
>
> So if 5 of those "locations" are within a certain distance from one
> another, Excel would assign a group number to those 5, and so on with
> all 20 locations.
>
> Can anyone point me into the right direction? Is this problem too
> difficult for wittle ol' Excel?

[grime]

I don't mind using VBA, which I figured was necessary, but I don't know where to start.

I'll check those links and see where that points me.

Thanks, and anyone else with additional information, please inform.

[Jerry W. Lewis]

http://www.statsoft.com/textbook/stcluan.html

would be a good starting point.

Jerry

grime wrote:

> I don't mind using VBA, which I figured was necessary, but I don't know
> where to start.
>
> I'll check those links and see where that points me.
>
> Thanks, and anyone else with additional information, please inform.