Latent class modeling as a probabilistic extension of K-means clustering

According to Kaufman and Rousseeuw (1990), cluster analysis is "the classification of similar objects into groups, where the number of groups, as well as their forms are unknown". This same definition could be used for exploratory Latent Class (LC) analysis where a K-class latent variable is used to explain the associations among a set of observed variables. Each latent class, like each cluster, groups together similar cases.