topic Re: Clustering a large dataset with mixed variable types in SAS Procedures

Clustering a large dataset with mixed variable types

roopk — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 22:58:00 GMT

I have a dataset that has 700,000 rows and various variables with mixed data-types: categorical, numeric and binary. I have read several suggestions on how to cluster categorical data but still couldn't find a solution for my problem. The common suggestions are listed below:

1) Use proc distance for the categorical variables to get a distance matrix and then use proc cluster: I can't do that as my dataset is too big to be handled by proc cluster. Another constraint is that even proc fastclus can handle a large dataset but it doesn't work with distance matrix or anything other than numeric data.

2) I don't find "creating dummy variables for the categorical variables" a good solution either as I feel the clusters would be hard to interpret.

3) Another suggestion was to use HPCLUS but HPCLUS can either use only categorical variables or only numeric interval variables to perform clustering but it does not perform clustering for mixed levels of input variables

Is there any other solution/proc available in SAS that could perform clustering on a large dataset with mixed variable types?

Re: Clustering a large dataset with mixed variable types

Reeza — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 03:00:55 GMT

How many variables do you have? 700k is a lot but I would have assumed SAS could handle it. Can you change your memory settings to allow it to be processed?

Re: Clustering a large dataset with mixed variable types

PGStats — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 03:18:36 GMT

EM has HPCLUS which should handle larger problems.

Re: Clustering a large dataset with mixed variable types

roopk — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 03:26:35 GMT

Can it handle mixed variable types too?

Re: Clustering a large dataset with mixed variable types

PGStats — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 03:29:01 GMT

The doc says it does, check

http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/miner/em14/emhpprcref.pdf

Re: Clustering a large dataset with mixed variable types

roopk — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 03:29:16 GMT

There are 100+ variables in total but I will do variable selection before using cluster analysis. I might start with only 8-10 variables but the issue is I don't know how to do cluster analysis with binary/categorical variables.

Re: Clustering a large dataset with mixed variable types

roopk — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 03:57:50 GMT

Thank you so much!

Re: Clustering a large dataset with mixed variable types

brintonj — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 19:49:22 GMT

Pg 82: "HPCLUS procedure uses only numeric interval variables or only nominal variables to perform clustering. It does not perform clustering for mixed levels of input variables."

Re: Clustering a large dataset with mixed variable types

PGStats — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 21:06:53 GMT

My bad. Out of the HP parallel processing procedures I only use HPSPLIT which allows mixed types. I wrongly assumed that HPCLUS would do the same.

Thanks @brintonj for setting the record strait.