QCA (version 2.6)

findTh: Find calibration thresholds

Description

The purpose of this function is to automatically find calibration thresholds for a numerical causal condition, to be split into separate groups.

Usage

findTh(x, n = 1, hclustm = "complete", distm = "euclidean", ...)

Arguments

x

A numerical causal condition.

n

The number of thresholds to find.

hclustm

The agglomeration (clustering) method to be used.

distm

The distance measure to be used.

...

Other arguments (mainly for backwards compatibility).

Value

A numeric vector of length n.

Details

The process of calibration into crisp sets assumes expert knowledge about the best threshold(s) which separates the raw data into the most meaningful groups.

In the absence of such knowledge, an automatic procedure might help grouping the raw data according to statistical clustering techniques.

The number of groups to split depends on the number of thresholds: one thresholds splits into two groups, two thresholds splits into three groups etc.

Previous versions of this function had an argument named groups instead of argument n, but they are bacwards compatible.

For more details about how many groups can be formed with how many thresholds, see ?cutree.

More details about the clustering techniques used in this function are found using ?hclust, and also more details about different distance measures can be found with ?dist. This function uses their default values.

See Also

cutree, hclust, dist

Examples

# NOT RUN {
# hypothetical list of country GDPs
gdp <- c(460, 500, 900, 2000, 2100, 2400, 15000, 16000, 20000)


# find one threshold to separate into two groups
findTh(gdp)
# 8700


# find two thresholds to separate into two groups
findTh(gdp, n = 2)
# 8700 18000


# using different clustering methods
findTh(gdp, n = 2, hclustm = "ward.D2", distm = "canberra")
# 1450 8700

# }