When you try to approximate your data with a mixture of distributions, say Gaussians for instance, you have to initialize their parameters with some values befo

When you try to approximate your data with a mixture of distributions, say Gaussians for instance, you have to initialize their parameters with some values before running your EM loop. Finding good ones can be very problematic. The k-means process is a reasonable method to get good enough starting values without having to think/compute too much. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation%E2%80%93maximization_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation%E2%80%93maximizati...