Related papers: A Tight Convex Upper Bound on the Likelihood of a …
An often-cited fact regarding mixing or mixture distributions is that their density functions are able to approximate the density function of any unknown distribution to arbitrary degrees of accuracy, provided that the mixing or mixture…
We explore computational aspects of maximum likelihood estimation of the mixture proportions of a nonparametric finite mixture model -- a convex optimization problem with old roots in statistics and a key member of the modern data analysis…
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…
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…
Normal mixture distributions are arguably the most important mixture models, and also the most technically challenging. The likelihood function of the normal mixture model is unbounded based on a set of random samples, unless an artificial…
Gaussian mixture models are central to classical statistics, widely used in the information sciences, and have a rich mathematical structure. We examine their maximum likelihood estimates through the lens of algebraic statistics. The MLE is…
We consider the problem of approximating a general Gaussian location mixture by finite mixtures. The minimum order of finite mixtures that achieve a prescribed accuracy (measured by various $f$-divergences) is determined within constant…
Finite mixture models are among the most popular statistical models used in different data science disciplines. Despite their broad applicability, inference under these models typically leads to computationally challenging non-convex…
Mixture models are one of the most widely used statistical tools when dealing with data from heterogeneous populations. This paper considers the long-standing debate over finite mixture and infinite mixtures and brings the two modelling…
Expectation Maximization (EM) is among the most popular algorithms for maximum likelihood estimation, but it is generally only guaranteed to find its stationary points of the log-likelihood objective. The goal of this article is to present…
Hyperbolic space is increasingly used for hierarchical, tree-like, and network-structured data, but likelihood-based density modeling on hyperbolic space remains relatively limited. This paper develops finite mixture modeling with isotropic…
We study Bayesian estimation of finite mixture models in a general setup where the number of components is unknown and allowed to grow with the sample size. An assumption on growing number of components is a natural one as the degree of…
Cluster-weighted modeling (CWM) is a mixture approach for modeling the joint probability of a response variable and a set of explanatory variables. The parameters are estimated by means of the expectation-maximization algorithm according to…
A line of recent work has analyzed the behavior of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm in the well-specified setting, in which the population likelihood is locally strongly concave around its maximizing argument. Examples include…
Finite mixture models are widely used in econometric analyses to capture unobserved heterogeneity. This paper shows that maximum likelihood estimation of finite mixtures of parametric densities can suffer from substantial finite-sample bias…
We derive uniform convergence rates for the maximum likelihood estimator and minimax lower bounds for parameter estimation in two-component location-scale Gaussian mixture models with unequal variances. We assume the mixing proportions of…
We consider a finite mixture of Gaussian regression model for high- dimensional data, where the number of covariates may be much larger than the sample size. We propose to estimate the unknown conditional mixture density by a maximum…
This paper is concerned with an important issue in finite mixture modelling, the selection of the number of mixing components. We propose a new penalized likelihood method for model selection of finite multivariate Gaussian mixture models.…
Mixture models, such as Gaussian mixture models, are widely used in machine learning to represent complex data distributions. A key challenge, especially in high-dimensional settings, is to determine the mixture order and estimate the…
We study parameter estimation in linear Gaussian covariance models, which are $p$-dimensional Gaussian models with linear constraints on the covariance matrix. Maximum likelihood estimation for this class of models leads to a non-convex…