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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

Silhouette 0.9.4 (July 2025)

CRAN release: 2025-07-30

  • Clarified the description of the PAC (Probability of Alternative Cluster) method in the documentation by citing the original authors (Author, Year).

  • Removed usage of installed.packages() from the package code and replaced it with a more robust and CRAN-compliant approach, following suggested practices.

  • All user-facing functions now include the argument print.summary, which controls whether summary details are printed. This argument behaves similarly to if (verbose) cat(...) and now defaults to FALSE.

  • Messages using message() are included in example sections to suggest installation of optional packages (e.g., ppclust, blockcluster). These packages are not called directly, but their outputs are used in examples. This is done to guide users without violating CRAN’s policy on requiring packages in examples.

  • Removed the license file as suggested.

Silhouette 0.9.3 (July 2025)

  • Removed Citation file from inst folder and added WORDLIST in it.
  • Modified Description and Title in DESCRIPTION file.

Silhouette 0.9.2 (July 2025)

Initial Stable Release

The first stable release of the Silhouette package, offering tools to compute and visualize silhouette widths for evaluating clustering quality. It supports both crisp and soft clustering outputs, along with multi-way clustering (e.g., biclustering).

Key Features

  • Silhouette()
    Computes silhouette widths using proximity matrices (dissimilarity or similarity). Supports "medoid" and "pac" normalization methods, and fuzzy silhouette calculation via membership probabilities.

  • softSilhouette()
    Tailored for soft clustering. Transforms membership probabilities into proximity measures (posterior probabilities, negative log-probabilities, or raw distributions) before silhouette computation.

  • extSilhouette()
    Extends silhouette analysis to multi-way clustering (e.g., biclustering or triclustering) by aggregating silhouette widths across modes, weighted by observation counts.

  • plotSilhouette()
    Creates detailed silhouette plots using ggplot2, with options for grayscale themes, cluster-wise summaries, and labeled observations. Compatible with outputs from Silhouette, softSilhouette, and popular packages like cluster and factoextra.

  • summary.Silhouette()
    Summarizes silhouette results, including average silhouette widths per cluster and overall summary statistics.

Dependencies

  • Imports: dplyr, ggplot2, ggpubr, methods
  • Suggests: proxy, ppclust, blockcluster, cluster, factoextra