Author : Nguyen Ky Nam

Summary : As one of the most frequent activities is to classify similar things into groups and cluster analysis or numerical taxonomy as it is called in biological sciences is considered as the last stage of grouping problems, this study aimed (a) to illustrate a method of hierarchical clustering, namely furthest-neighbor cluster analysis and some of its applications in social and biological sciences; (b) to explain some methods of standardizing variables as a way of equalizing the contribution of each variables prior to the clustering process; (c) to introduce some SAS (Statistical Analysis Systems) program packages especially the CLUSTER procedure and the MATRIX procedure, with their capability in data manipulation.