SPSS Errors - Hierarchical cluster analysis Ward's method

bedrock#1

Hi there,

Trying to do a Hierarchical cluster analysis using Ward's method to extract media frames from a data set I've created in spss.

I'm having a problem with the syntax file with spss showing me the following errors in the output file.

>Error # 63 in column 14. Text: C:\DOCUME~1\Ross\LOCALS~1\Temp\spss4256\spssclus.tmp
>The file does not exist.
>Execution of this command stops.

ERASE FILE='C:\DOCUME~1\Ross\LOCALS~1\Temp\spss4256\spssclus.tmp'.

>Error # 2302 in column 13. Text: C:\DOCUME~1\Ross\LOCALS~1\Temp\spss4256\spssclus.tmp
>The specified file does not exist and cannot be erased.
>Execution of this command stops.

I cannot find anything online that gives me a solution I can understand!

If anyne has any idea how I can fix this I would be eternally grateful!!

R

Ostrom

Are you running the procedure through the dialogs or through the syntax? Honestly, I have no idea what that message is - I use clustering quite a bit and I've not seen that (it's been a while since I've used SPSS). Are there missing values in the columns?

I'm sure I sound like broken record saying this, but do you have access to stata, or would you entertain downloading r? The SPSS file is readily interchangeable with a little fiddling (especially easy with stata), and the clustering routines are much simpler in stata also. At a push, you could estimate the number of clusters using this rule of thumb: [sqrt(n/2)], then run a k-means analysis in SPSS, but I assume you want to estimate the grouping structure from the dendrogram?

Kevster

If you're still stuck, then you can just use the following code in R Programming Language:

plot(hclust(dist(MATRIX, method="euclidean"), method="ward"), labels=MATRIX$labels)

...where MATRIX is a matrix or data-frame of data values

Kevin