Dirichlet Process Mixture Model

The Dirichlet Process Mixture Model (DPMM) is a nonparametric Bayesian clustering method introduced through Ferguson's (1973) Dirichlet process prior that places a probability distribution over distributions. Unlike finite mixture models, the DPMM does not require the analyst to specify the number of clusters in advance; instead it infers the number of components from the data, allowing an effectively unbounded mixture that grows as more observations arrive.