English
Related papers

Related papers: A Proximal Point Algorithm for Minimum Divergence …

200 papers

We develop and analyze $M$-estimation methods for divergence functionals and the likelihood ratios of two probability distributions. Our method is based on a non-asymptotic variational characterization of $f$-divergences, which allows the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-11-18 XuanLong Nguyen , Martin J. Wainwright , Michael I. Jordan

Information divergences allow one to assess how close two distributions are from each other. Among the large panel of available measures, a special attention has been paid to convex $\varphi$-divergences, such as Kullback-Leibler,…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2019-04-09 Mireille El Gheche , Giovanni Chierchia , Jean-Christophe Pesquet

Tensor-based discrete density estimation requires flexible modeling and proper divergence criteria to enable effective learning; however, traditional approaches using $\alpha$-divergence face analytical challenges due to the $\alpha$-power…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-26 Kazu Ghalamkari , Jesper Løve Hinrich , Morten Mørup

Mixture distributions arise in many parametric and non-parametric settings -- for example, in Gaussian mixture models and in non-parametric estimation. It is often necessary to compute the entropy of a mixture, but, in most cases, this…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Artemy Kolchinsky , Brendan D. Tracey

The likelihood function of a finite mixture model is a non-convex function with multiple local maxima and commonly used iterative algorithms such as EM will converge to different solutions depending on initial conditions. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-08-19 Elad Mezuman , Yair Weiss

The EM algorithm is a widely used methodology for penalized likelihood estimation. Provable monotonicity and convergence are the hallmarks of the EM algorithm and these properties are well established for smooth likelihood and smooth…

Computation · Statistics 2011-06-02 Stéphane Chrétien , Alfred Hero , Hervé Perdry

The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is an iterative method to maximize the log-likelihood function for parameter estimation. Previous works on the convergence analysis of the EM algorithm have established results on the asymptotic…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-05-31 Chong Wu , Can Yang , Hongyu Zhao , Ji Zhu

We introduce an optimization model for maximum likelihood-type estimation (M-estimation) that generalizes a large class of existing statistical models, including Huber's concomitant M-estimator, Owen's Huber/Berhu concomitant estimator, the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-10-09 Patrick L. Combettes , Christian L. Müller

In this article, we revisit the problem of fitting a mixture model under the assumption that the mixture components are symmetric and log-concave. To this end, we first study the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation (NPMLE) of a…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-02-28 Xiao Pu , Ery Arias-Castro

We revisit the classical problem of deriving convergence rates for the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) in finite mixture models. The Wasserstein distance has become a standard loss function for the analysis of parameter estimation in…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-06-22 Tudor Manole , Nhat Ho

Theoretical guarantees are established for a standard estimator in a semi-parametric finite mixture model, where each component density is modeled as a product of univariate densities under a conditional independence assumption. The focus…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-07 Marie Du Roy de Chaumaray , Michael Levine , Matthieu Marbac

Mixture of Experts (MoE) are successful models for modeling heterogeneous data in many statistical learning problems including regression, clustering and classification. Generally fitted by maximum likelihood estimation via the well-known…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-30 Faicel Chamroukhi , Bao-Tuyen Huynh

Mixtures of linear mixed models (MLMMs) are useful for clustering grouped data and can be estimated by likelihood maximization through the EM algorithm. The conventional approach to determining a suitable number of components is to compare…

Applications · Statistics 2014-05-26 Siew Li Tan , David J. Nott

The Expectation-Maximisation (EM) algorithm is a central tool in statistics and machine learning, widely used for latent-variable models such as Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). Despite its ubiquity, EM is typically treated as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Samuel Boïté , Eloi Tanguy , Julie Delon , Agnès Desolneux , Rémi Flamary

We observe a $n$-sample, the distribution of which is assumed to belong, or at least to be close enough, to a given mixture model. We propose an estimator of this distribution that belongs to our model and possesses some robustness…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-02-06 Alexandre Lecestre

In this contribution, we propose a generic online (also sometimes called adaptive or recursive) version of the Expectation-Maximisation (EM) algorithm applicable to latent variable models of independent observations. Compared to the…

Computation · Statistics 2017-03-02 Olivier Cappé , Eric Moulines

We study modeling and inference with the Elliptical Gamma Distribution (EGD). We consider maximum likelihood (ML) estimation for EGD scatter matrices, a task for which we develop new fixed-point algorithms. Our algorithms are efficient and…

Computation · Statistics 2018-06-04 Reshad Hosseini , Suvrit Sra , Lucas Theis , Matthias Bethge

We study mixture of linear regression (random coefficient) models, which capture population heterogeneity by allowing the regression coefficients to follow an unknown distribution $G^*$. In contrast to common parametric methods that fix the…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-01 Hansheng Jiang , Adityanand Guntuboyina

We study the convergence behavior of the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm on Gaussian mixture models with an arbitrary number of mixture components and mixing weights. We show that as long as the means of the components are separated…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-10-10 Ruofei Zhao , Yuanzhi Li , Yuekai Sun

The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is of key importance for inference in latent variable models including mixture of regressors and experts, missing observations. This paper introduces a novel EM algorithm, called…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Gersende Fort , Eric Moulines , Hoi-To Wai