On Choosing a Mixture Model for Clustering

Abstract

2 Universit e de Caen Abstract: Two methods for clustering data and choosing a mixture model are proposed. First, we derive a new classication algorithm based on the classication likelihood. Then, the likelihood conditional on these clusters is written as the product of likelihoods of each cluster, and AIC- respectively BIC-type approximations are applied. The resulting criteria turn out to be the sum of the AIC or BIC relative to each cluster plus an entropy term. The performance of our methods is evaluated by Monte-Carlo methods and on a real data set, showing in particular that the iterative estimation algorithm converges quickly in general, and thus the computational load is rather low.