Balanced longitudinal data clustering with a copula kernel mixture model

Many common clustering methods cannot be used for clustering balanced multivariate longitudinal data in cases where the covariance of variables is a function of the time points. In this article, a copula kernel mixture model (CKMM) is proposed for clustering data of this type. The CKMM is a finite mixture model that decomposes each mixture component's joint density function into a copula and marginal distribution functions. In this decomposition, the Gaussian copula is used due to its mathematical tractability and Gaussian kernel functions are used to estimate the marginal distributions. A generalized expectation-maximization algorithm is used to estimate the model parameters. The performance of the proposed model is assessed in a simulation study and on two real datasets. The proposed model is shown to have effective performance in comparison with standard methods, such as $K$-means with dynamic time warping clustering, latent growth models and functional high-dimensional data clustering.