Gower's Distance for Clustering - Standardization necessary?

[SAS_ASS]

I'm making a cluster analysis in SAS Enterprise Miner. Due to the various scales of my variables (interval, binary, nominal) I want to use Gower's Distance for the distance matrice. After that I want to import that matrice to a cluster node.

In the cluster node you can select standardization for the cluster analysis (range standardization) . Do I need this, if I have already calculated Gower's Distance, which is kind of standardization?

Thanks and kind regards

[MikeStockstill]

Thank you for your interest.

The Cluster node in Enterprise Miner does not accept distance data as input.  If you want to perform a cluster analysis on your Gower's distance matrix, then use PROC CLUSTER or PROC MODECLUS in SAS/STAT software.

Have a great day!