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Sometimes one or more clusters deviate strongly from the Gaussian assumption. If a Gaussian mixture is fitted to such data, a strongly non-Gaussian cluster will often be represented by several mixture components rather than a single one. In that case, cluster merging can be used to find a better clustering. [20]
Cluster analysis or clustering is the task of grouping a set of objects in such a way that objects in the same group (called a cluster) are more similar (in some specific sense defined by the analyst) to each other than to those in other groups (clusters).
Automatic clustering algorithms are algorithms that can perform clustering without prior knowledge of data sets. In contrast with other cluster analysis techniques, automatic clustering algorithms can determine the optimal number of clusters even in the presence of noise and outlier points. [1] [needs context]
The average silhouette of the data is another useful criterion for assessing the natural number of clusters. The silhouette of a data instance is a measure of how closely it is matched to data within its cluster and how loosely it is matched to data of the neighboring cluster, i.e., the cluster whose average distance from the datum is lowest. [8]
In probability theory and statistics, a Gaussian process is a stochastic process (a collection of random variables indexed by time or space), such that every finite collection of those random variables has a multivariate normal distribution.
Gaussian functions are widely used in statistics to describe the normal distributions, in signal processing to define Gaussian filters, in image processing where two-dimensional Gaussians are used for Gaussian blurs, and in mathematics to solve heat equations and diffusion equations and to define the Weierstrass transform.
The EM algorithm consists of two steps: the E-step and the M-step. Firstly, the model parameters and the () can be randomly initialized. In the E-step, the algorithm tries to guess the value of () based on the parameters, while in the M-step, the algorithm updates the value of the model parameters based on the guess of () of the E-step.
The Gaussian distribution belongs to the family of stable distributions which are the attractors of sums of independent, identically distributed distributions whether or not the mean or variance is finite. Except for the Gaussian which is a limiting case, all stable distributions have heavy tails and infinite variance.