I am new to data analytics. As part of my assignment I have to perform both hierarchical and Kmeans clustering on a data set wherein all applicable variables are ordinal (1-5 rating scale). Do I need to scale the data before performing clustering?
2 Answers
If all applicable variables are ordinal and they're all in the same scale ie: 1-5, scaling would be totally unnecessary.
The whole point of scaling is to bring attributes with values in differing magnitudes to the same scale. Bottomline, here you don't need to scale the data.
Hope this helps!
scaling should be performed if different features are measured on different scales. You don't need scaling if your data is measured on same scale.