Topics under Model Based Cluster Analysis Can anyone recommended topic(s) I could use for my thesis under "Model Based Cluster Analysis"? I initially used "Inference in Model Based Cluster Analysis" as my working topic but appears to be broader than I expected. I want a topic I can relate with finding groups using model based cluster analysis. I would really appreciate your help.
 A: A good option, in my opinion, would be to focus for example on high-dimensional model-based clustering. It is a very active field which is somehow linked to all the current "big data" hype.
The main idea behind is that, to cluster efficiently high-dimensional data, you either have to


*

*assume that each group lives in a low-dimensional subspace (Tipping & Bishop, 1999)

*project the whole data on a single low-dimensional subspace (Bouveyron & Brunet, 2012)

*assume that only a few variables are truly relevant (Raftery & Dean, 2006)
A nice review is presented for instance by Bouveyron & Brunet-Saumard (2014). All these articles are freely available on their authors' webpages.
References.
Bouveyron, C., & Brunet, C. (2012). Simultaneous model-based clustering and visualization in the Fisher discriminative subspace. Statistics and Computing, 22(1), 301-324.
Bouveyron, C., & Brunet-Saumard, C. (2014). Model-based clustering of high-dimensional data: A review. Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, 71, 52-78.
Raftery, A. E. and Dean, N. (2006). Variable selection for model-based clustering. Journal of the American Statistical
Association, 101:168–178.
Tipping, M., & Bishop, C. (1999). Mixtures of probabilistic principal component analyzers. Neural computation, 11(2), 443-482.
