1 Department of Information Technology, College of Computers and Information Technology, Taif University, P.O. Box 11099, Taif 21944, Saudi Arabia.
2 The Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering (CIISE), Concordia University, Montreal, QC H3G 1T7, Canada.

Finite Gamma mixture models have proved to be flexible and can take prior information into account to improve generalization capability, which make them interesting for several machine learning and data mining applications. In this study, an efficient Gamma mixture model-based approach for proportional vector clustering is proposed. In particular, a sophisticated entropy-based variational algorithm is developed to learn the model and optimize its complexity simultaneously. Moreover, a component-splitting principle is investigated, here, to handle the problem of model selection and to prevent over-fitting, which is an added advantage, as it is done within the variational framework. The performance and merits of the proposed framework are evaluated on multiple, real-challenging applications including dynamic textures clustering, objects categorization and human gesture recognition.