Scaling of ordinal data before both hierarchical and KMeans clustering I am new to data analytics. As part of my assignment I have to perform both hierarchical and Kmeans clustering on a data set wherein all applicable variables are ordinal (1-5 rating scale). Do I need to scale the data before performing clustering?
If all applicable variables are ordinal and they're all in the same scale ie: 1-5, scaling would be totally unnecessary.

The whole point of scaling is to bring attributes with values in differing magnitudes to the same scale. Bottomline, here you don't need to scale the data.

Hope this helps!