This is an old version, view current version.

9.1 Relation to finite mixture models

As mentioned in the clustering section, clustering models and finite mixture models are really just two sides of the same coin. The “soft” \(K\)-means model described in the next section is a normal mixture model (with varying assumptions about covariance in higher dimensions leading to variants of \(K\)-means). Latent Dirichlet allocation is a mixed-membership multinomial mixture.