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 method comparison and clustering with both partitioning and model-based methods.
With flexord, we provide new distance and centroid functions and new distribution drivers that are tailored towards clustering ordinal or mixed-with-ordinal data.
We wrote this package accompanying 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 collected the state of the art of ordinal data clustering and applied many of the methods in our extensive simulation study. The simulation reproduction code itself is collected in the repository AJS-flexord.
You can find a more end user friendly introduction into the package, and a listing of the new methods we provide here.
You can install the developer version of the package via:
devtools::install_github("dernst/flexord")The stable version will soon be available on CRAN (via install.packages("flexord")).