Visualizing Group Structure

Cluster analysis is a fundamental principle in exploratory data analysis, providing the user with a description of the group structure of given data. A key problem in this context is the interpretation and visualization of clustering solutions in high-dimensional or abstract data spaces. In particular, probabilistic descriptions of the group structure, essential to capture inter-cluster relationships, are hardly assessable by simple inspection ofthe probabilistic assignment variables. VVe present a novel approach to the visualization of group structure. It is based on a statistical model of the object assignments which have been observed or estimated by a probabilistic clustering procedure. The objects or data points are embedded in a low dimensional Euclidean space by approximating the observed data statistics with a Gaussian mixture model. The algorithm provides a new approach to the visualization of the inherent structure for a broad variety of data types, e.g.