Taper Adaptive Clustering tolerancing details

How do Taper Adaptive Clustering tolerancing work?Taper Adaptive Clustering groups will move slightly to adapt.  Once a sample is within a group the group will average all existing samples with the new sample to form a new center or group standard.  As you add new pieces the influence is less and less as the new sample has less of an affect on the average. 

1. Default DEcmc limit is the default tolerance for new groups.  Keep in mind a group size of DEcmc of 0.40 samples can be as much as 0.80 from each other.
2. Maximum number of groups is the maximum of how many groups Taper is allowed to create.  Maximum program limit is 26.  You may need to limit less than 26 to keep down the number of separate groups.
3. Cluster margin is the area just outside of an existing cluster that a sample may be close to.  How close is set by the margin.
4. Minimum pieces to establish a group.  How many samples in an area of color space before Taper creates a new Adaptive Cluster group.  You may not want it to create a group for just one sample as it may have been a mistake and no other samples will be near it. 
5. Maximum Pieces to disable adapting.  Once a group is created the group will move slightly as more samples are added and the average of all the included samples changes.  If you don't want the group adapting you can set the max pieces to the same as minimum pieces.
6. Maximum unclustered pts. saved in profile.  If a sample is not assigned a group it will be saved in the profile as unclustered.  Then when new samples are entered it will use saved unclustered samples to see if there are enough samples to create a new cluster.

Optimize.  When you run Taper using Adaptive Clustering you can have overlapping cluster groups.  The groups get created around the average of samples it includes so the groups may overlap some.  You can manually Optimize the groups which will in move/adapt the groups slightly according to other groups rather than on samples alone.  Go to Ad. Clustering to edit the Standard profile.  In the bottom white box where all the group information is there is a button to Optimize.  If you do not have a group selected the button will say optimize all.  Pressing this button will move slightly all the groups to minimize overlapping of each other.  You will need to push this button several times until you do not see the groups adapting any more.  You can tell when a group is moving by the DL*, Da* and Db*, signifying the center of the group, is changing.  Once the numbers stop changing the groups have optimized according to the history and each other.  If you select a single group other than group A the button becomes optimize selected group and only the selected group will move/adapt to try and optimize it’s position.

Manually create groups.  If you run Taper by itself without going through Color iControl you can edit the standards profiles or create a new profile in advance.  Go to File then Create/Edit Adaptive Cluster Profile.  You can choose one to edit or create a new one in advance.  Group A will always be around the standard.  But you can create your own groups in an existing standard or in a newly created standard by clicking Edit/Create Cluster in the group box.  This will ask you for the ID which is the letter you want to assign, the DL*,Da* and Db* from standard for the center of this group and the group DEcmc size.  If you have visually grouped pieces already you can take the average of the group or select a piece as you standard for a group and enter the information manually creating groups.  You can take it one step further after creating groups and optimizing all groups so that Taper will adjust the groups to minimize overlap.
 
Adaptive Review.  When you are in Color iControl under the Tools menu you can choose Setup SLI-Taper Parameters then Adaptive Review.  You only want to send samples to Adaptive Cluster once.  If you keep sending the same roll Taper will learn history from the same sample over and over again.  If you want to run Adaptive Cluster on samples that have already been sent to Taper and is already in the profile history there is Adaptive Review.  This will send the samples to Taper and taper will run and report Groups but will not add to history or adapt groups using the new rolls.  You can send samples to Taper and after a day or two you can go I and Optimize your groups.  If you send the same samples back to Taper only set to Adaptive Review any sample whose group shifted enough for it to land in another group will be assigned the new group letter.  For instance this morning the sample that was in Group B that overlapped into Group C if during Optimize Group C moved then running Adaptive Review will then show that sample as Group B.