Hierarchical Gaussian mixture model with objects attached to terminal and non-terminal dendrogram nodes

Abstract

A hierarchical clustering algorithm based on Gaussian mixture model is presented. The key difference to regular hierarchical mixture models is the ability to store objects in both terminal and nonterminal nodes. Upper levels of the hierarchy contain sparsely distributed objects, while lower levels contain densely represented ones.As it was shown by experiments, this ability helps in noise detection (modeling). Furthermore, compared to regular hierarchical mixture model, the presented method generates more compact dendrograms with higher quality measured by adopted F-measure.