The FASTCLUS Procedure

The FASTCLUS procedure performs a disjoint cluster analysis on the basis of distances computed from one or more quantitative variables. The observations are divided into clusters such that every observation belongs to one and only one cluster; the clusters do not form a tree structure as they do in the CLUSTER procedure. If you want separate analyses for different numbers of clusters, you can run PROC FASTCLUS once for each analysis. Alternatively, to do hierarchical clustering on a large data set, use PROC FASTCLUS to find initial clusters, and then use those initial clusters as input to PROC CLUSTER.

By default, the FASTCLUS procedure uses Euclidean distances, so the cluster centers are based on least squares estimation. This kind of clustering method is often called a k-means model, since the cluster centers are the means of the observations assigned to each cluster when the algorithm is run to complete convergence. Each iteration reduces the least squares criterion until convergence is achieved.

Often there is no need to run the FASTCLUS procedure to convergence. PROC FASTCLUS is designed to find good clusters (but not necessarily the best possible clusters) with only two or three passes through the data set. The initialization method of PROC FASTCLUS guarantees that, if there exist clusters such that all distances between observations in the same cluster are less than all distances between observations in different clusters, and if you tell PROC FASTCLUS the correct number of clusters to find, it can always find such a clustering without iterating. Even with clusters that are not as well separated, PROC FASTCLUS usually finds initial seeds that are sufficiently good that few iterations are required. Hence, by default, PROC FASTCLUS performs only one iteration.

The initialization method used by the FASTCLUS procedure makes it sensitive to outliers. PROC FASTCLUS can be an effective procedure for detecting outliers because outliers often appear as clusters with only one member.

The FASTCLUS procedure can use an (least pth powers) clustering criterion (Spath; 1985, pp. 62–63) instead of the least squares () criterion used in k-means clustering methods. The LEAST=p option specifies the power p to be used. Using the LEAST= option increases execution time since more iterations are usually required, and the default iteration limit is increased when you specify LEAST=p. Values of p less than 2 reduce the effect of outliers on the cluster centers compared with least squares methods; values of p greater than 2 increase the effect of outliers.

The FASTCLUS procedure is intended for use with large data sets, with 100 or more observations. With small data sets, the results can be highly sensitive to the order of the observations in the data set.

PROC FASTCLUS uses algorithms that place a larger influence on variables with larger variance, so it might be necessary to standardize the variables before performing the cluster analysis. See the “Using PROC FASTCLUS” section for standardization details.

PROC FASTCLUS produces brief summaries of the clusters it finds. For more extensive examination of the clusters, you can request an output data set containing a cluster membership variable.