About cookies on this site Our websites require some cookies to function properly (required). In addition, other cookies may be used with your consent to analyze site usage, improve the user experience and for advertising. For more information, please review your options. By visiting our website, you agree to our processing of information as described in IBM’sprivacy statement. To provide a smooth navigation, your cookie preferences will be shared across the IBM web domains listed here.
Publication
ICASSP 1998
Conference paper
Clustering via the Bayesian information criterion with applications in speech recognition
Abstract
One difficult problem we are often faced with in clustering analysis is how to choose the number of clusters. We propose to choose the number of clusters by optimizing the Bayesian information criterion (BIC), a model selection criterion in the statistics literature. We develop a termination criterion for the hierarchical clustering methods which optimizes the BIC criterion in a greedy fashion. The resulting algorithms are fully automatic. Our experiments on Gaussian mixture modeling and speaker clustering demonstrate that the BIC criterion is able to choose the number of clusters according to the intrinsic complexity present in the data. © 1998 IEEE.