Commentary on Steinley and Brusco (2011): Recommendations and cautions.

Abstract

I discuss the recommendations and cautions in Steinley and Brusco's (2011) article on the use of finite models to cluster a data set. In their article, much use is made of comparison with the K-means procedure. As noted by researchers for over 30 years, the K-means procedure can be viewed as a special case of finite mixture modeling in which the components are in equal (fixed) proportions and are taken to be normal with a common spherical covariance matrix. In this commentary, I pay particular attention to this link and to the use of normal mixture models with arbitrary component-covariance matrices.