An improved Gaussian mixture model （GMM）- based clustering method is proposed for the difficult case where the true distribution of data is against the assumed GMM. First, an improved model selection criterion, the completed likelihood minimum message length criterion, is derived. It can measure both the goodness-of-fit of the candidate GMM to the data and the goodness-of-partition of the data. Secondly, by utilizing the proposed criterion as the clustering objective function, an improved expectation- maximization （EM） algorithm is developed, which can avoid poor local optimal solutions compared to the standard EM algorithm for estimating the model parameters. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can rectify the over-fitting tendency of representative GMM-based clustering approaches and can robustly provide more accurate clustering results.
