language barrier
Last week, I was at Tufts colloquium and happened to have a conversation with a computer scientist about density based clustering. I understood density as probabilistic density and was recollecting a paper by Fraley and Raftery (Model-Based Clustering, Discriminant Analysis, and Density Estimation, JASA, 2002, 97, p.458) and other similar papers I saw in engineering journals like IEEE transactions. For a few moments, I felt uncomfortable and she explained that density meant “how dense observations are.” Density based clustering was meant to be distance based clustering, like k-means, minimum spanning tree, most likely nonparametric approaches. Continue reading ‘language barrier’ »