Interesting sub-text at last week's excellent conference when people started talking about big data - it seems that statisticians don't like methods based on algorithms. Now cluster analysis which has been around for more than 40 years is algorithm based, albeit
that the mathematical basis of it is accessible in a way that the coding schemes of learning algorithms are not, and has in my view been far too little used in exploratory data analysis. Is that also down to a prejudice against algorithms?
David Byrne Ph.D., FAcSS
see my recent book:
Class after Industry: a complex realist approach