K-Means and Gaussian Mixture Modeling with a Separation Constraint

07/09/2020

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by   He Jiang, et al.

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We consider the problem of clustering with K-means and Gaussian mixture models with a constraint on the separation between the centers in the context of real-valued data. We first propose a dynamic programming approach to solving the K-means problem with a separation constraint on the centers, building on (Wang and Song, 2011). In the context of fitting a Gaussian mixture model, we then propose an EM algorithm that incorporates such a constraint. A separation constraint can help regularize the output of a clustering algorithm, and we provide both simulated and real data examples to illustrate this point.