Radford Neal wrote: > There is a huge literature on determining the number of components > AFTER seeing the data. In my opinion, it is mostly misdirected. > I'd recommend that you consider carefully whether your real > objective is connected to determining the number of components in a > Gaussian mixture. I doubt that it is.
There is a very actual need to identify specific clusters/components. Human mind functions on the basis of identified concepts and groups. For example, there are many symptoms in medicine. The clusters/components are diseases, the necessary simplifications physicians use to be able to diagnose, decide and cure. A very interesting problem is to examine the medical data and identify cases where two different diseases are really a single one, or when a single disease should be separated into several types. For example: L Peelen, N Peek, K Zwinderman: Statistical methods to compare different definitions of disease with an application to severe sepsis. http://magix.fri.uni-lj.si/idamap/idamap2003/Peelen.pdf We're not always modelling the truth, we're sometimes trying to help people understand the world by simplifying it. Of course, there is no need to constrain a computer to human cognitive limitations, and here Radford's point stands. -- mag. Aleks Jakulin http://ai.fri.uni-lj.si/aleks/ Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana. . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
