Related papers: Learning Mixtures of Plackett-Luce Models
We describe $k$-MLE, a fast and efficient local search algorithm for learning finite statistical mixtures of exponential families such as Gaussian mixture models. Mixture models are traditionally learned using the expectation-maximization…
Given data drawn from a mixture of multivariate Gaussians, a basic problem is to accurately estimate the mixture parameters. We give an algorithm for this problem that has a running time, and data requirement polynomial in the dimension and…
We give an algorithm for learning a mixture of {\em unstructured} distributions. This problem arises in various unsupervised learning scenarios, for example in learning {\em topic models} from a corpus of documents spanning several topics.…
We consider a discriminative learning (regression) problem, whereby the regression function is a convex combination of k linear classifiers. Existing approaches are based on the EM algorithm, or similar techniques, without provable…
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…
Plackett-Luce gradient estimation enables the optimization of stochastic ranking models within feasible time constraints through sampling techniques. Unfortunately, the computational complexity of existing methods does not scale well with…
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…
This paper explores unsupervised learning of parsing models along two directions. First, which models are identifiable from infinite data? We use a general technique for numerically checking identifiability based on the rank of a Jacobian…
In applications such as rank aggregation, mixture models for permutations are frequently used when the population exhibits heterogeneity. In this work, we study the widely used Mallows mixture model. In the high-dimensional setting, we…
In-context learning (ICL) adapts large language models by conditioning on a small set of ICL examples, avoiding costly parameter updates. Among other factors, performance is often highly sensitive to the ordering of the examples. However,…
In learning theory, a standard assumption is that the data is generated from a finite mixture model. But what happens when the number of components is not known in advance? The problem of estimating the number of components, also called…
We introduce the problem of learning mixtures of $k$ subcubes over $\{0,1\}^n$, which contains many classic learning theory problems as a special case (and is itself a special case of others). We give a surprising $n^{O(\log k)}$-time…
We propose the use of probability models for ranked data as a useful alternative to a quantitative data analysis to investigate the outcome of bioassay experiments, when the preliminary choice of an appropriate normalization method for the…
We propose a novel and flexible rank-breaking-then-composite-marginal-likelihood (RBCML) framework for learning random utility models (RUMs), which include the Plackett-Luce model. We characterize conditions for the objective function of…
We consider PAC learning of probability distributions (a.k.a. density estimation), where we are given an i.i.d. sample generated from an unknown target distribution, and want to output a distribution that is close to the target in total…
Gaussian mixture models (GMM) are the most widely used statistical model for the $k$-means clustering problem and form a popular framework for clustering in machine learning and data analysis. In this paper, we propose a natural semi-random…
Deep Generative Models (DGMs) are versatile tools for learning data representations while adequately incorporating domain knowledge such as the specification of conditional probability distributions. Recently proposed DGMs tackle the…
A common way to learn and analyze statistical models is to consider operations in the model parameter space. But what happens if we optimize in the parameter space and there is no one-to-one mapping between the parameter space and the…
We study the problem of learning mixtures of low-rank models, i.e. reconstructing multiple low-rank matrices from unlabelled linear measurements of each. This problem enriches two widely studied settings -- low-rank matrix sensing and mixed…
The aggregation of k-ary preferences is a historical and important problem, since it has many real-world applications, such as peer grading, presidential elections and restaurant ranking. Meanwhile, variants of Plackett-Luce model has been…