  The interest in variable selection for clustering has increased recently due
to the growing need in clustering high-dimensional data. Variable selection
allows in particular to ease both the clustering and the interpretation of the
results. Existing approaches have demonstrated the efficiency of variable
selection for clustering but turn out to be either very time consuming or not
sparse enough in high-dimensional spaces. This work proposes to perform a
selection of the discriminative variables by introducing sparsity in the
loading matrix of the Fisher-EM algorithm. This clustering method has been
recently proposed for the simultaneous visualization and clustering of
high-dimensional data. It is based on a latent mixture model which fits the
data into a low-dimensional discriminative subspace. Three different approaches
are proposed in this work to introduce sparsity in the orientation matrix of
the discriminative subspace through $\ell_{1}$-type penalizations. Experimental
comparisons with existing approaches on simulated and real-world data sets
demonstrate the interest of the proposed methodology. An application to the
segmentation of hyperspectral images of the planet Mars is also presented.
