title: Differences between PAM and Metis partitioning
body: <p>Is Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM; a robust version of k-means) much different than METIS partitioning of matrices? I mean of course they are different methods, but will the output be substantially different?</p>
  
  <p>I don't know Metis, just know that it is a partitioning method for matrices.  If one applied PAM and Metis to distance matrix, how different would the results be?</p>
  
  <p>Background: I read a working paper that used Metis to partition a sociomatrix (an nxn matrix of who is friends with whom).  Since Metis is not implemented in R, I want to roughly get at their results using PAM.</p>
  
  <p>Thoughts?  Any references would be very helpful.</p>