A mean field games perspective on evolutionary clustering

We propose a control-theoretic framework for evolutionary clustering based on quasi-stationary Mean Field Games. Each cluster is represented by a probability density whose evolution is governed by a Fokker–Planck equation, while the associated velocity field is determined through a stationary Hamilton–Jacobi equation. The general formulation does not prescribe a finite-dimensional statistical shape for the component densities, although the number of components is fixed. In the Gaussian specialization, we show that suitable affine dynamics reproduce the mean and covariance trajectories generated by the classical Expectation–Maximization procedure. To improve temporal coherence in the presence of noise and temporary cluster overlaps, we introduce causal and non-causal time-averaged log-likelihood objectives. We also develop a fully density-based numerical implementation for non-Gaussian components. The proposed formulations are assessed on synthetic and real time-dependent datasets and compared with independent snapshot Expectation–Maximization and with the same method applied to temporally smoothed observations. In the two-dimensional benchmark, an established evolutionary k-means method is also included as an external dynamic-clustering baseline.