[Linkpost] “If you’re not sure how to sort a list or grid—seriate it!” by gwern

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

This is a link post. "Getting Things in Order: An Introduction to the R Package seriation":
Seriation [or "ordination"), i.e., finding a suitable linear order for a set of objects given data and a loss or merit function, is a basic problem in data analysis. Caused by the problem's combinatorial nature, it is hard to solve for all but very small sets. Nevertheless, both exact solution methods and heuristics are available.
In this paper we present the package seriation which provides an infrastructure for seriation with R. The infrastructure comprises data structures to represent linear orders as permutation vectors, a wide array of seriation methods using a consistent interface, a method to calculate the value of various loss and merit functions, and several visualization techniques which build on seriation.
To illustrate how easily the package can be applied for a variety of applications, a comprehensive collection of [...]
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First published:
May 28th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u2ww8yKp9xAB6qzcr/if-you-re-not-sure-how-to-sort-a-list-or-grid-seriate-it
Linkpost URL:
https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/download/v025i03/227
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.