Modeling and Clustering Positive Vectors via Nonparametric Mixture Models of Liouville Distributions

In this article, we propose an effective mixture model-based approach to modeling and clustering positive data vectors. Our mixture model is based on the inverted Beta-Liouville (IBL) distribution which is extracted from the family of Liouville distributions. To cope with the problem of determining the appropriate number of clusters in our approach, a nonparametric Bayesian framework is used to extend the IBL mixture to an infinite mixture model in which the number of clusters is assumed to be infinite initially and will be inferred automatically during the learning process. To optimize the proposed model, we propose a convergence-guaranteed learning algorithm based on the averaged collapsed variational Bayes inference that can effectively learn model parameters with closed-form solutions. The effectiveness of the proposed infinite IBL mixture model for modeling and clustering positive vectors is validated through both synthetic and real-world data sets.