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Josephine Mater works for the supply-chain analytics division of Trader Joe's, a national chain of specialty grocery stores

Operations Management

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Josephine Mater works for the supply-chain analytics division of Trader Joe's, a national chain of specialty grocery stores. Trader Joe's is considering a redesign of its supply chain. Josephine knows that Trader Joe's uses frequent truck shipments from its distribution centers to its retail stores. To keep costs low, retail stores are typically located near a distribution center. The file TraderJoes contains data on the location of Trader Joe's retail stores. Josephine would like to use k-means clustering with k = 8 to estimate the preferred locations for a proposal to use eight distribution centers to support its retail stores.

In the Data tab of the Rattle GUI - R window, uncheck the box next to Partition. For the Longitude and Latitude variables, select the Input button. Select the Ignore button for the other variables and then click Execute button. In the Cluster tab, in the Type: row, select KMeans, de-select the box next to Iterate Clusters. Enter 8 in the Clusters: box, enter 42 in the Seed: box, and enter 1000 in the Runs: box. De-select the box next to Re-Scale. Then, click the Execute button. To generate various statistics on the clusters, on the Cluster tab, click Stats.

Click on the datafile logo to reference the data.