The origin of the centroid shadow value is calculated in the shadow
function of the flexclust package, in which it is based on the first and
second closest centroid. The csv
function in this package modifies
the centroid into medoid such that the formula to compute shadow value of
object i is
$$csv(i) = \frac{2d(i, m(i))}{d(i, m(i)) + d(i, m'(i))}$$
where \(d(i, m(i))\) is the distance between object i to the first
closest medoid and d(i, m'(i)) is the distance between object
i to the second closest medoid.
The idmedoid
argument corresponds to the idcluster
argument.
If the length of idmedoid
is 3, for example, the idcluster
has
to have 3 unique cluster memberships, or it returns Error
otherwise.
The length of the idcluster
has also to be equal to n
(the number of objects). In contrast to the silhoutte value,
the centoird shadow value is interpreted that lower value is the better
cluster separation.