AN ALTERNATING COMBINATORIAL OPTIMIZATION APPROACH TO FITTING THE INDCLUS AND GENERALIZED INDCLUS MODELS

This paper presents a general approach for fitting the ADCLUS (Shepard and Arabie 1979; Arabie, Carroll, DeSarbo, and Wind 1981), INDCLUS (C arroll and Arabie 1983), and potentially a special case of the GENNCLU S (DeSarbo 1982) models. The proposed approach, based largely on a sep arability property observed for the least squares loss function being optimized, offers increased efficiency and other advantages over exist ing approaches like MAPCLUS (Arabie and Carroll 1980) for fitting the ADCLUS model, and the INDCLUS method for fitting the INDCLUS model. Th e new procedure (called ''SINDCLUS'') is applied to three sets of empi rical data to demonstrate the effectiveness of the SINDCLUS methodolog y. Finally, some potentially useful extensions are discussed.