A new EM algorithm for resource allocation network

Abstract

Clustering usually assumes that the number of clusters is known or given. No knowledge of such a priori information is needed to find an appropriate number of clusters. This paper introduces an elliptical clustering algorithm with incremental growth of clusters, which is derived from the batch EM algorithm with a decay factor and a novelty criterion. The proposed algorithm can start with no or a small number of clusters. Whenever unusual data is presented, the algorithm adds a new cluster and finally the number of clusters in the data is obtained after clustering. The usefulness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated for texture image segmentation and skin image segmentation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.