Mixtures of Factor Analyzers with Common Factor Loadings: Applications to the Clustering and Visualization of High-Dimensional Data

Mixtures of factor analyzers enable model-based density estimation to be undertaken for high-dimensional data, where the number of observations n is not very large relative to their dimension p. In practice, there is often the need to further reduce the number of parameters in the specification of the component-covariance matrices. To this end, we propose the use of common component-factor loadings, which considerably reduces further the number of parameters. Moreover, it allows the data to be displayed in low-dimensional plots.