Googling for sphericity gives wikipedia as a first link which says: Sphericity is a measure of how spherical (round) an object is.
The second hit gives the connection with statistics, in particular ANOVA, http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/faciliti/facilities/statistics/spher.htm hth, Ingmar On Sep 12, 2007, at 5:13 PM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Dear list, first apologies for this is not strictly an R question but > a theoretical one. > > I have read that use of k-means clustering assumes sphericity of data > distribution. Can anyone explain me what this means? My statistical > background is too poor. Is it another kind of distribution, like > gaussian or binomial? What does it happen if the distribution is not > spherical? Could you give me an example or a link to information about > this? > > Thanks for your help > > David > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting- > guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
