How to cluster Houses on the basis of similarity of features+location?

Question

I have a dataset of houses like this:

HouseID  Latitude Longitude PriceIndex
  1          1.4     103.120    1.21
  2          1.42    103.112    2.01

I want to find houses which are similar to each other both on the basis of their position as well as their price index.[Also would need to Rank in order of similarities, given one house] I tried using hclust package in R and was able to extract 9 classes. However the groups don't seem to have any interpretable similarities (for example the points are spread all across the city etc). I haven't done clustering based projects before so any help in the right direction will be helpful. Thanks!

Edit: Removing the price index column from the clustering data-set actually clusters spatially. But adding the price shows only price-based clustering

Did you try doing k-means clustering? – Dawny33 Dec 01 '15 at 06:39 — Dawny33, Dec 01 '15 at 06:39
@Dawny33 :yes, similar results. – UD1989 Dec 01 '15 at 06:53 — UD1989, Dec 01 '15 at 06:53

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:50

1

Check the ranges of your dimensions and consider scaling if you see a large difference.

I would interpret your described behaviour due to much larger range if the index that the two other dimensions. See also the question.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:50

Community

1

answered Dec 01 '15 at 09:26

Marmite Bomber

1,103
1
8
11

Yes! Scaling solved the problem. I had scaled the variables individually but not with respect to each other -how stupid. Thanks a lot! – UD1989 Dec 01 '15 at 09:43

How to cluster Houses on the basis of similarity of features+location?

1 Answers1