Question

I’m looking for a basic implementation of EM clustering in R. So far, what I can find seem to be specialized or ‘some-assembly-required’ versions of it. For example, the implementation from mclust defines a range of parameters that I’m not familiar with and doesn’t take a parameter for k. What I am looking for is something closer to the kmeans implementation that comes with R, or ELKI‘s implementation of EM.

Answer 1

How about reading the documentation for mclust?

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/mclust/mclust.pdf

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Data_Mining_Algorithms_In_R/Clustering/Expectation_Maximization_%28EM%29

Make sure to choose the desired model (probably VVV?), and if you want a fixed k, then set G to a single value instead of the default 1:9.

Try this:

library(mclust)
m <- Mclust(data, 4:4, c("VVV"), control=emControl(tol=e1-4))

I must say I don’t use or like R much. It has tons of stuff, but it doesn’t fit together. It’s just random stuff written independently by random people and then uploaded to a central repository. But there is no QA at all, and nobody that makes libraries compatible.