set.seed

A variation of the standard definition of Kendall correlation coefficient is necessary in order to deal with data samples with tied ranks. It known as the Kendall’s tau-b coefficient and is more effective in determining whether two non-parametric data samples with ties are correlated.

With the distance matrix found in previous tutorial, we can use various techniques of cluster analysis for relationship discovery. For example, in the data set mtcars, we can run the distance matrix with hclust, and plot a dendrogram that displays a hierarchical relationship among the vehicles.