A novel multimodal probability model for cluster analysis

Cluster analysis is a tool for data analysis. It is a method for finding clusters of a data set with most similarity in the same group and most dissimilarity between different groups. In general, there are two ways, mixture distributions and classification maximum likelihood method, to use probability models for cluster analysis. However, the corresponding probability distributions to most clustering algorithms such as fuzzy c-means, possibilistic c-means, mode-seeking methods, etc., have not yet been found. In this paper, we construct a multimodal probability distribution model and then present the relationships between many clustering algorithms and the proposed model via the maximum likelihood estimation. ? 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.EI