Flexible Clustering of Ordinal and Mixed-with-Ordinal Data.

flexord

This R package and github repository is an add-on package to the R packages flexclust and flexmix. These two root packages are suites for flexible clustering with both partitioning and model-based methods allowing for easy method variation and comparison.

With flexord, we provide new distance and centroid functions and new model drivers for component distributions that are tailored towards clustering ordinal or mixed-with-ordinal data.

We wrote this package to accompany the paper "Ordinal clustering in the flex-scheme" (2025) by Ernst D, Ortega Menjivar L, Scharl T, Grün B, currently submitted to AJS. In this paper, we reviewed methods available for ordinal data clustering and applied many of the methods in our extensive simulation study. The replication code for the simulation study itself is collected in the repository AJS-flexord.

You can find a more end user friendly introduction to the package, and a listing of the new methods we provide here.

Installation

The stable version of the package is available at CRAN, and can be installed via:

install.packages("flexord")

You can install the developer version of the package via:

devtools::install_github("dernst/flexord")