Probabilistic reduced K-means cluster analysis

Cluster analysis is one of unsupervised learning techniques used for discovering clusters when there is no prior knowledge of group membership. K-means, one of the commonly used cluster analysis techniques, may fail when the number of variables becomes large. In such high-dimensional cases, it is common to perform tandem analysis, K-means cluster analysis after reducing the number of variables using dimension reduction methods. However, there is no guarantee that the reduced dimension reveals the cluster structure properly. Principal component analysis may mask the structure of clusters, especially when there are large variances for variables that are not related to cluster structure. To overcome this, techniques that perform dimension reduction and cluster analysis simultaneously have been suggested. This study proposes probabilistic reduced K-means, the transition of reduced K-means (De Soete and Caroll, 1994) into a probabilistic framework. Simulation shows that the proposed method performs better than tandem clustering or clustering without any dimension reduction. When the number of the variables is larger than the number of samples in each cluster, probabilistic reduced K-means show better formation of clusters than non-probabilistic reduced K-means. In the application to a real data set, it revealed similar or better cluster structure compared to other methods.