Model--based clustering for spherical and hyper--spherical data using elliptically symmetric distributions

Model–based clustering for directional data data has attracted a lot of interest, but most methods utilize rotationally symmetric distributions. This paper suggests the use of elliptically symmetric distributions, namely the elliptically symmetric angular Gaussian and the spherical elliptically symmetric projected Cauchy distributions that were recently proposed in the literature for modelling spherical data. The expectation–maximization algorithm is employed and the inclusion of covariates is also examined. Simulation studies compare the two distributions in terms of choosing the optimal number of clusters and computational cost. We use the mixtures of these two distributions to cluster two datasets on the sphere (earthquake locations) and two hyper–spherical datasets.