Minimum Description Length and Psychological Clustering Models

Clustering is one of the most basic and useful methods of data analysis. This chapter describes a number of powerful clustering models, developed in psychology, for representing objects using data that measure the similarities between pairs of objects. These models place few restrictions on how objects are assigned to clusters, and allow for very general measures of the similarities between objects and clusters. Geometric Complexity Criteria (GCC) are derived for these models, and are used to fit the models to similarity data in a way that balances goodness-of-fit with complexity. Complexity analyses, based on the GCC, are presented for the two most widely used psychological clustering models, known as " additive clustering " and " additive trees " .