Parameter Setting for Evolutionary Latent Class Clustering

The latent class model or multivariate multinomial mixture is a powerful model for clustering discrete data. This model is expected to be useful to represent non-homogeneous populations. It uses a conditional independence assumption given the latent class to which a statistical unit is belonging. However, it leads to a criterion that proves difficult to optimise by the standard approach based on the EM algorithm. An Evolutionary Algorithms is designed to tackle this discrete optimisation problem, and an extensive parameter study on a large artificial dataset allows to derive stable parameters. Those parameters are then validated on other artificial datasets, as well as on some well-known real data: the Evolutionary Algorithm performs repeatedly better than other standard clustering techniques on the same data.