Data Clustering

Chapter 3

Probabilistic Models for Clustering

Hongbo Deng

University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignUrbana, [e-mail]

Jiawei Han

University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignUrbana, [e-mail]

3.1 Introduction

Probabilistic model-based clustering techniques have been widely used and have shown promising results in many applications, ranging from image segmentation [71, 15], handwriting recognition [60], document clustering [36, 81], topic modeling [35, 14] to information retrieval [43]. Model-based clustering approaches attempt to optimize the fit between the observed data and some mathematical model using a probabilistic approach. Such methods are often based on the assumption that the data are generated by a mixture of underlying ...