I am recreating a project that uses multidimensional scaling (MDS) to visualise the data in the final stage. Specifically, the original work uses MATLAB's mdscale
with the metricsstress
parameter which according to the documentation uses 'Squared stress, normalized with the sum of 4th powers of the dissimilarities'.
My preferred environment is python and the only implementation of MDS I'm aware of is sklearn.manifold.MDS which uses SMACOF. Here stress as the 'sum of squared distance of the disparities and the distances for all constrained points' but nothing is said about the normalisation.
My question is: were I to use the sklearn implementation in place of the mdscale one, would the results be comparable?