Band Depth based initialization of $k$-Means for functional data clustering

Abstract

The $k$-Means algorithm is one of the most popular choices for clustering data but is well-known to be sensitive to the initialization process. There is a substantial number of methods that aim at finding optimal initial seeds for $k$-Means, though none of them are universally valid. This paper presents an extension to longitudinal data of one of such methods, the BRIk algorithm, that relies on clustering a set of centroids derived from bootstrap replicates of the data and on the use of the versatile Modified Band Depth. In our approach we improve the BRIk method by adding a step where we fit appropriate B-splines to our observations and a resampling process that allows computational feasibility and handling issues such as noise or missing data. Our results with simulated and real data sets indicate that our $F$unctional Data $A$pproach to the BRIK method (FABRIk) is more effective than previous proposals at providing seeds to initialize $k$-Means in terms of clustering recovery.