Clustering is widely used as a knowledge discovery method in scientific studies but is not often used in architectural research. This paper applies clustering to a dataset of 129 residential layouts, which were collected from contemporary architectural practices, to reveal underlying design patterns. To achieve this, this paper introduces a novel measure for the topological properties of layouts: ‘grating difference measure’. It was benchmarked against an alternative that measures geometrical properties and the advantages are explained. The grating difference measure indicates the extent of design differences, which is used in the clustering method to obtain the distance between datapoints. The results from clustering were grouped into design schematics and qualitatively assessed, showing a convincing separation of characteristics. The method demonstrated in this paper may be used to reveal topological patterns in datasets of existing designs for both academic and practical purposes.

中文翻译：

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使用光栅差异的新方法比较和聚类住宅布局

聚类在科学研究中被广泛用作一种知识发现方法，但在建筑研究中并不经常使用。本文将聚类应用于从当代建筑实践中收集的 129 个住宅布局的数据集，以揭示潜在的设计模式。为了实现这一点，本文引入了一种用于布局拓扑特性的新度量：“光栅差异度量”。它以测量几何特性的替代方案为基准，并解释了其优点。光栅差异度量表示设计差异的程度，用于聚类方法中以获得数据点之间的距离。聚类的结果被分组到设计示意图中并进行定性评估，显示出令人信服的特征分离。