Related papers: Learning Mixtures of Plackett-Luce Models
Mixtures of ranking models have been widely used for heterogeneous preferences. However, learning a mixture model is highly nontrivial, especially when the dataset consists of partial orders. In such cases, the parameter of the model may…
Recent work has shown that finite mixture models with $m$ components are identifiable, while making no assumptions on the mixture components, so long as one has access to groups of samples of size $2m-1$ which are known to come from the…
Mixture models of Plackett-Luce (PL) -- one of the most fundamental ranking models -- are an active research area of both theoretical and practical significance. Most previously proposed parameter estimation algorithms instantiate the EM…
Random Utility Models (RUMs), which subsume Plackett-Luce model (PL) as a special case, are among the most popular models for preference learning. In this paper, we consider RUMs with features and their mixtures, where each alternative has…
Mixtures of ranking models are standard tools for ranking problems. However, even the fundamental question of parameter identifiability is not fully understood: the identifiability of a mixture model with two Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL)…
The method of moments is a classical statistical technique for density estimation that solves a system of moment equations to estimate the parameters of an unknown distribution. A fundamental question critical to understanding…
Finite mixture models are statistical models which appear in many problems in statistics and machine learning. In such models it is assumed that data are drawn from random probability measures, called mixture components, which are…
In this paper, we consider mixtures of multinomial logistic models (MNL), which are known to $\epsilon$-approximate any random utility model. Despite its long history and broad use, rigorous results are only available for learning a uniform…
Generalised linear models for multi-class classification problems are one of the fundamental building blocks of modern machine learning tasks. In this manuscript, we characterise the learning of a mixture of $K$ Gaussians with generic means…
A simple generative model for rank ordered data with ties is presented. The model is based on ordering geometric latent variables and can be seen as the discrete counterpart of the Plackett-Luce (PL) model, a popular, relatively tractable…
This work concerns learning probabilistic models for ranking data in a heterogeneous population. The specific problem we study is learning the parameters of a Mallows Mixture Model. Despite being widely studied, current heuristics for this…
Mixture models are a fundamental tool in applied statistics and machine learning for treating data taken from multiple subpopulations. The current practice for estimating the parameters of such models relies on local search heuristics…
Mixture modeling is a general technique for making any simple model more expressive through weighted combination. This generality and simplicity in part explains the success of the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, in which updates…
We study the complexity of learning $k$-mixtures of Gaussians ($k$-GMMs) on $\mathbb{R}^d$. This task is known to have complexity $d^{\Omega(k)}$ in full generality. To circumvent this exponential lower bound on the number of components,…
The elicitation of an ordinal judgment on multiple alternatives is often required in many psychological and behavioral experiments to investigate preference/choice orientation of a specific population. The Plackett-Luce model is one of the…
Learning a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is a fundamental problem in machine learning, learning theory, and statistics. One notion of learning a GMM is proper learning: here, the goal is to find a mixture of $k$ Gaussians $\mathcal{M}$ that…
Mixtures of Mallows models are a popular generative model for ranking data coming from a heterogeneous population. They have a variety of applications including social choice, recommendation systems and natural language processing. Here we…
In this paper, we consider mixtures of two Mallows models for top-$k$ rankings, both with the same location parameter but with different scale parameters, i.e., a mixture of concentric Mallows models. This situation arises when we have a…
In this paper, we study the problem of learning multi-dimensional Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs), with a specific focus on model order selection and efficient mixing distribution estimation. We first establish an information-theoretic lower…
We propose an Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) learning algorithm, based on our previous work of GMM expansion idea. The new algorithm brings more robustness and simplicity than classic Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. It also improves…