Better title: study picks 9 categories and assigns chroinic pains to one of those categories, proving that data can be sorted into arbitrary categories.
>The agglomeration method that we adopt is Ward’s method, which aims to min- imize the total within-cluster variance. At each step in Ward’s method, the algorithm finds two clusters that will result in minimum increase in total within-cluster variance after fusing. The number of clusters was narrowed by cluster size and similarity to 9 total groups through review of dendrograms and heat maps by non-clinician investigators (A.G. and N.A.).
1. Pick an algorithm.
2. Get a number of clusters. Preferably below 10, because otherwise it gets too messy for publication.
3. Justify algorithm based on its first paragraph on Wikipedia.
More over, picking new categories is a great application of "big data".
Real example:
Imagine catalog for fashion retailer. Time to add color picker & filter. No agreement on color names, how many shades of gray, etc.
So one of our big data gurus figures it out. Gather dozens of palettes. Social cognition style guessing game. Slice & dice our product catalog 100s of ways to get best fit.
Result was a thing of beauty. Truly novel. The analysis worthy of a PhD.
i like your spin on it to height. albiet pain likely has a multidimensional graph to cluster onto, height having one dimension makes the whole idea of clustering it silly :)
I am by no means an expert, but I have spent time and experience enough with chronic pain to state that this rather one dimensional. Meaning their group although big was narrow in scope. For example, no chronic head pain?
We have been working on a VR body mapping app(https://www.hatsumivr.com/), I'm the art lead on it. And you quickly find that there is an ocean if different experiences out there, and thats probably the biggest obstacle to helping people with chronic pain. Its is often treated (at the policy level) as one condition with a select few options for treatment. Studies with conclusion like this reinforce a reductionism in medical spaces and leave the people that don't fit into their pidgin holes out in the cold, alone, and in pain.
As I suffer from relentless chronic pain, I was hoping to read something insightful. What I saw might as well been on reddit/r/coolguides. Your post gave me a chuckle.
