CLASSIFICATION OF TROPICAL RAINFALL STATIONS - A COMPARISON OF CLUSTERING-TECHNIQUES

Following an earlier paper, which classified tropical rainfall station s using 34 variables and a single clustering approach, this paper comp ares the results with those utilizing three other methods. A variety o f measures were used to assess 'performance' of the methods. Three of the methods (Ward Average Linkage, and Lance-Williams) produced very s imilar results, and even the other one (Centroid) showed a reasonably similar pattern. The similarity in results from the different methods suggests that the station groups obtained are meaningful. However, min or differences are worthy of consideration when climatological interpr etation is undertaken at a later stage of the project.