The initialization is based on Coretto and Hennig (2017). First, wwo
steps are performed:
Step 1 (denoising step): for each data point compute its
kth-nearest neighbors
distance (k-NND). All points with k-NND larger
than the (1-knnd.trim)-quantile of the k-NND
are initialized as noise. Intepretaion of
k is that: (k-1), but not k, points close
together may still be interpreted as noise or outliers
Step 2 (clustering step): perform the model-based hierarchical
clustering (MBHC) proposed in Fraley (1998). This step is performed using
hc. The input argument modelName is passed
to hc. See Details of
hc for more details.
If the previous Step 2 fails to provide G clusters each
containing at least 2 distinct data points, it is replaced with
classical hirararchical clustering implemented in
hclust. Finally, if
hclust fails to provide a valid partition, up
to ten random partitions are tried.