Section: New Software and Platforms

BlockCluster

Block Clustering

Keywords: Mixture model - Block cluster analysis

Scientific Description

Blockcluster is software devoted to model-based block clustering. It is developed in partnership with the MODAL team (Inria Lille). This year, some major bugs have been fixed, and the Bayesian point of view has been reinforced by including Gibbs sampling for binary and categorial data. This Gibbs sampler, coupled with the variational Bayes algorithm, provides solutions which are more stable and less dependent on the initial values of the algorithm. An exact expression of the ICL criterion has also been provided. This non-asymptotic criterion appears to be more relevant than the BIC-like approximation of ICL.

Functional Description

BlockCluster is an R package for co-clustering of binary, contingency and continuous data based on mixture models.

• Participants: Gilles Celeux, Christine Keribin, Christophe Biernacki and Serge Iovleff

• Contact: Gilles Celeux

• URL: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/blockcluster/index.html