R help - May 2013 - distances between entities

Hello all, please forgive my lack of knowledge, but I am somewhat new to R and
would be very grateful for some help. I have tried some searches, but am not
even quite sure what to search for.  I will describe my problem:
I have a number of nodes (or entities)  and pairwise (Euclidean) distances for
SOME of the pairs of nodes, but I do not know where in the space my nodes lie.
Is there a package of some kind that would allow me to generate a best-possible
picture of the geometry of the nodes, i.e. a guess as to where most of them are
in the space (relative to each other). I know it is impossible to get the full
picture (since I have incomplete information), but a kind of minimum-error
guess?
Please let me know if you need more information, or if you suspect you have an
answer to my query.
Thank you very much,
Rory
	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

Have you looked into "multidimensional scaling"?  There are lots of
variants,
many of which are in R packages.

Bill Dunlap
Spotfire, TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at
r-project.org] On Behalf
> Of Rory Wilson
> Sent: Saturday, May 18, 2013 8:45 AM
> To: R help
> Subject: [R] distances between entities
> 
> Hello all, please forgive my lack of knowledge, but I am somewhat new to R
and would
> be very grateful for some help. I have tried some searches, but am not even
quite sure
> what to search for. ?I will describe my problem:
> I have a number of nodes (or entities) ?and pairwise (Euclidean) distances
for SOME of the
> pairs of nodes, but I do not know where in the space my nodes lie. Is there
a package of
> some kind that would allow me to generate a best-possible picture of the
geometry of
> the nodes, i.e. a guess as to where most of them are in the space (relative
to each other).
> I know it is impossible to get the full picture (since I have incomplete
information), but a
> kind of minimum-error guess?
> Please let me know if you need more information, or if you suspect you have
an answer
> to my query.
> Thank you very much,
> Rory
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]