How to define the number of clusters for the cluster procedure.

[wutao9999]

For the SAS cluster procedure, how to define the number of clusters as cluster output?  For example, if I want to have 3 clusters after clustering:

cluster method = eml data = dateset outtree = output ;

by column1 ;

var net_sales ;

run ;

What changes I need to make to enforce the above cluster procedure only generating 3 clusters?  Thank you.

[mohamed_zaki · Accepted solution]

PROC CLUSTER requires more work to do. Why do not you use PROC FASTCLUSTER and use the maxc= option in it. Also you can added it to a macro to try different number of cluster.

But if you still need to use PROC CLUSTER you can use PROC TREE after it and use nclusters= option to choose the number of cluster. Here is a good example of using PROC CLUSTER and PROC TREE. Example 91.1 Mammals’ Teeth