On online high-dimensional spherical data clustering and feature selection

Motivated by the high demand to construct compact and accurate statistical models that are automatically adjustable to dynamic changes, in this paper, we propose an online probabilistic framework for high-dimensional spherical data modeling. The proposed framework allows simultaneous clustering and feature selection in online settings using finite mixtures of von Mises distributions (movM). The unsupervised learning of the resulting model is approached using Expectation Maximization (EM) for parameter estimation along with minimum message length (MML) to determine the optimal number of mixture components. The gradient stochastic descent approach is considered for incremental updating of model parameters, also. Through empirical experiments, we demonstrate the merits of the proposed learning framework on diverse high dimensional datasets and challenging applications.