Using the PAM algorithm to group the most important global economies in the context of energy consumption

The purpose of the paper is to draft a typology of countries in the context of meeting their energy demand as well as to define the current position of Poland. In order to pursue that purpose, the clustering method was applied; the countries were divided into homogeneous groups and Poland was placed in one of them. The obtained results can serve as a starting point for other elaborations on ensuring energy security, fulfilling EU obligations, optimisation of structure of the energy sources in use, as well as energy efficiency improvement. Within the clustering method, the Partitioning Around Medoids algorithm was used. PAM was developed by Leonard Kaufman and Peter J. Rousseeuw in 1987 and it was implemented as the pam() function of the cluster package, which is run in the software environment; R PAM is the most common realisation of non-hierarchical, k-medoids clustering method. For evaluation of clustering, the silhouette() function was applied, which is also included in the cluster package.