Clustering remains a vibrant area of research in statistics. Although there are many books on this topic, there are relatively few that are well founded in the theoretical aspects. This book presents an overview of the theory and applications of probabilistic clustering and variable selection, synthesizing the key research results of the last 50 years. It includes all the important theoretical details, and covers the probabilistic models and inference, robustness issues, optimization algorithms, validation techniques and variable selection methods. The book illustrates the different methods with simulated data and applies them to real-world data sets that can be easily downloaded from the web.
