To bridge the performance gap between original probability data association (PDA) algorithm and the optimum maximum a posterior (MAP) algorithm for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) detection, a grouped PDA (GP-PDA) detection algorithm is proposed. The proposed GP-PDA method divides all the transmit antennas into groups, and then updates the symbol probabilities group by group using PDA computations. In each group, joint a posterior probability (APP) is computed to obtain the APP of a single symbol in this group, like the MAP algorithm. Such new algorithm combines the characters of MAP and PDA. MAP and original PDA algorithm can be regarded as a special case of the proposed GP-PDA. Simulations show that the proposed GP-PDA provides a performance and complexity tradeoff between original PDA and MAP algorithm.