A probabilistic hierarchical clustering method for organising collections of text documents

Abstract

A generic probabilistic framework for the unsupervised hierarchical clustering of large-scale sparse high-dimensional data collections is proposed. The framework is based on a hierarchical probabilistic mixture methodology. Two classes of models emerge from the analysis and these have been called symmetric and asymmetric models. For text data specifically both asymmetric and symmetric models based on multinomial and binomial distributions are most appropriate. An expectation maximisation parameter estimation method is provided for all of these models. An experimental comparison of the models is obtained for two extensive online document collections.