Improved clustering using deterministic annealing with a gradient descent technique

Various techniques exist to solve the non-convex optimization problem of clustering. Recent developments have employed a deterministic annealing approach to solving this problem. In this letter a new approximation clustering algorithm, incorporating a gradient descent technique with deterministic annealing, is described. Results are presented for this new method, and its performance is compared with the K-means algorithm and a previously used deterministic annealing clustering algorithm. The new method is shown to produce more effective and robust clustering.