How to create a cluster plot in R?

Question

How can I create a cluster plot in R without using clustplot?

I am trying to get to grips with some clustering (using R) and visualisation (using HTML5 Canvas).

Answer 1

Did you mean something like this? Sorry but i know nothing about HTML5 Canvas, only R... But I hope it helps...

First I cluster the data using kmeans (note that I did not cluster the distance matrix), than I compute the distance matix and plot it using cmdscale. Then I add colors to the MDS-plot that correspond to the groups identified by kmeans. Plus some nice additional graphical features.

You can access the coordinates from the object created by cmdscale.

### some sample data
require(vegan)
data(dune)

# kmeans
kclus <- kmeans(dune,centers= 4, iter.max=1000, nstart=10000)

# distance matrix
dune_dist <- dist(dune)

# Multidimensional scaling
cmd <- cmdscale(dune_dist)

# plot MDS, with colors by groups from kmeans
groups <- levels(factor(kclus$cluster))
ordiplot(cmd, type = "n")
cols <- c("steelblue", "darkred", "darkgreen", "pink")
for(i in seq_along(groups)){
  points(cmd[factor(kclus$cluster) == groups[i], ], col = cols[i], pch = 16)
}

# add spider and hull
ordispider(cmd, factor(kclus$cluster), label = TRUE)
ordihull(cmd, factor(kclus$cluster), lty = "dotted")