mclust 5: Clustering, Classification and Density Estimation Using Gaussian Finite Mixture Models

Finite mixture models are being used increasingly to model a wide variety of random phenomena for clustering, classification and density estimation.mclust is a powerful and popular package which allows modelling of data as a Gaussian finite mixture with different covariance structures and different numbers of mixture components, for a variety of purposes of analysis.Recently, version 5 of the package has been made available on CRAN.This updated version adds new covariance structures, dimension reduction capabilities for visualisation, model selection criteria, initialisation strategies for the EM algorithm, and bootstrap-based inference, making it a full-featured R package for data analysis via finite mixture modelling.