Applications of cluster analysis to some problems of interest to the U.S. Department of State

Abstract

This thesis asserts that Cluster Analysis, or Numerical Taxonomy, has many potential applications in the field of international relations. It demonstrates two representative applications. Both examples treat the nations of the world as objects having measurable attributes, and both examples use selected attributes to produce a dendrogram (or hierarchival classification) of the nations of the world. In one example this dendrogram is used to objectively group the nations into blocs based on external economic ties. In the other example the dendrogram is used to highlight interactions among five attributes, ignoring the identity of individual nations, the same way a scatter plot highlights interactions between two variables.