Related papers: Constrained Optimization for a Subset of the Gauss…
This paper deals with parameter estimation when the data are randomly right censored. The maximum likelihood estimates from censored samples are obtained by using the expectation-maximization (EM) and Monte Carlo EM (MCEM) algorithms. We…
We investigate a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) with component means constrained in a pre-selected subspace. Applications to classification and clustering are explored. An EM-type estimation algorithm is derived. We prove that the subspace…
Expectation maximization (EM) is a technique for estimating maximum-likelihood parameters of a latent variable model given observed data by alternating between taking expectations of sufficient statistics, and maximizing the expected log…
We systematically study various network Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithms for the Gaussian mixture model within the framework of decentralized federated learning. Our theoretical investigation reveals that directly extending the…
We provide two fundamental results on the population (infinite-sample) likelihood function of Gaussian mixture models with $M \geq 3$ components. Our first main result shows that the population likelihood function has bad local maxima even…
Although the expectation maximisation (EM) algorithm was introduced in 1970, it remains somewhat inaccessible to machine learning practitioners due to its obscure notation, terse proofs and lack of concrete links to modern machine learning…
Research on cluster analysis for categorical data continues to develop, with new clustering algorithms being proposed. However, in this context, the determination of the number of clusters is rarely addressed. In this paper, we propose a…
We investigate a clustering problem with data from a mixture of Gaussians that share a common but unknown, and potentially ill-conditioned, covariance matrix. We start by considering Gaussian mixtures with two equally-sized components and…
The Expectation-Maximization algorithm is perhaps the most broadly used algorithm for inference of latent variable problems. A theoretical understanding of its performance, however, largely remains lacking. Recent results established that…
The speed of convergence of the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm for Gaussian mixture model fitting is known to be dependent on the amount of overlap among the mixture components. In this paper, we study the impact of mixing…
Online variants of the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm have recently been proposed to perform parameter inference with large data sets or data streams, in independent latent models and in hidden Markov models. Nevertheless, the…
The present work proposes hybridization of Expectation-Maximization (EM) and K-Means techniques as an attempt to speed-up the clustering process. Though both K-Means and EM techniques look into different areas, K-means can be viewed as an…
We consider the problem of spherical Gaussian Mixture models with $k \geq 3$ components when the components are well separated. A fundamental previous result established that separation of $\Omega(\sqrt{\log k})$ is necessary and sufficient…
Partially recorded data are frequently encountered in many applications and usually clustered by first removing incomplete cases or features with missing values, or by imputing missing values, followed by application of a clustering…
We consider the problem of estimating the parameters a Gaussian Mixture Model with K components of known weights, all with an identity covariance matrix. We make two contributions. First, at the population level, we present a sharper…
We investigate the convergence properties of the EM algorithm when applied to overspecified Gaussian mixture models -- that is, when the number of components in the fitted model exceeds that of the true underlying distribution. Focusing on…
In this paper, we formulate the problem of inferring a Finite Mixture Model from discrete data as an optimal transport problem with entropic regularization of parameter $\lambda\geq 0$. Our method unifies hard and soft clustering, the…
We study crowdsourcing quality management, that is, given worker responses to a set of tasks, our goal is to jointly estimate the true answers for the tasks, as well as the quality of the workers. Prior work on this problem relies primarily…
We study the optimization landscape of the log-likelihood function and the convergence of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm in latent Gaussian tree models, i.e. tree-structured Gaussian graphical models whose leaf nodes are…
The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is routinely used for the maximum likelihood estimation in the latent class analysis. However, the EM algorithm comes with no guarantees of reaching the global optimum. We study the geometry of…