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An example of cluster sampling is area sampling or geographical cluster sampling.Each cluster is a geographical area in an area sampling frame.Because a geographically dispersed population can be expensive to survey, greater economy than simple random sampling can be achieved by grouping several respondents within a local area into a cluster.
Cluster analysis or clustering is the task of grouping a set of objects in such a way that objects in the same group (called a cluster) are more similar (in some specific sense defined by the analyst) to each other than to those in other groups (clusters).
For this reason, cluster sampling requires a larger sample than SRS to achieve the same level of accuracy – but cost savings from clustering might still make this a cheaper option. Cluster sampling is commonly implemented as multistage sampling. This is a complex form of cluster sampling in which two or more levels of units are embedded one ...
For example, in cluster sampling we can use a two stage sampling in which we sample each cluster (which may be of different sizes) with equal probability, and then sample from each cluster at the second stage using SRS with a fixed proportion (e.g. sample half of the cluster, the whole cluster, etc.).
The average silhouette of the data is another useful criterion for assessing the natural number of clusters. The silhouette of a data instance is a measure of how closely it is matched to data within its cluster and how loosely it is matched to data of the neighboring cluster, i.e., the cluster whose average distance from the datum is lowest. [8]
In cluster analysis, the elbow method is a heuristic used in determining the number of clusters in a data set. The method consists of plotting the explained variation as a function of the number of clusters and picking the elbow of the curve as the number of clusters to use.
k-means clustering is a method of vector quantization, originally from signal processing, that aims to partition n observations into k clusters in which each observation belongs to the cluster with the nearest mean (cluster centers or cluster centroid), serving as a prototype of the cluster.
In one-dimensional systematic sampling, progression through the list is treated circularly, with a return to the top once the list ends. The sampling starts by selecting an element from the list at random and then every k th element in the frame is selected, where k, is the sampling interval (sometimes known as the skip): this is calculated as: [3]