Model-based multidimensional clustering of categorical data

Existing models for cluster analysis typically consist of a number of attributes that describe the objects to be partitioned and one single latent variable that represents the clusters to be identified. When one analyzes data using such a model, one is looking for way to cluster data that is jointly defined by all the attributes. In other words, one performs unidimensional clustering. This is not always appropriate. For complex data with many attributes, it is more reasonable to consider multidimensional clustering, i.e., to partition data along multiple dimensions. In this paper, we present a method for performing multidimensional clustering on categorical data and show its superiority over unidimensional clustering.