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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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-23 Xinyu Liu , Hai Zhang

In this paper we provide a new analysis of the SEM algorithm. Unlike previous work, we focus on the analysis of a single run of the algorithm. First, we discuss the algorithm for general mixture distributions. Second, we consider Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-07-03 Johannes Blömer , Kathrin Bujna , Daniel Kuntze

Expectation maximisation (EM) is an unsupervised learning method for estimating the parameters of a finite mixture distribution. It works by introducing "hidden" or "latent" variables via Baum's auxiliary function $Q$ that allow the joint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-19 Graham W. Pulford

We develop a general framework for proving rigorous guarantees on the performance of the EM algorithm and a variant known as gradient EM. Our analysis is divided into two parts: a treatment of these algorithms at the population level (in…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-08-12 Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Martin J. Wainwright , Bin Yu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-24 Nimrod Segol , Boaz Nadler

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-09-06 Chi Jin , Yuchen Zhang , Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Martin J. Wainwright , Michael Jordan

Conditional correlation networks, within Gaussian Graphical Models (GGM), are widely used to describe the direct interactions between the components of a random vector. In the case of an unlabelled Heterogeneous population, Expectation…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-03-09 Thomas Lartigue , Stanley Durrleman , Stéphanie Allassonnière

This paper studies the problem of estimating the means $\pm\theta_{*}\in\mathbb{R}^{d}$ of a symmetric two-component Gaussian mixture $\delta_{*}\cdot N(\theta_{*},I)+(1-\delta_{*})\cdot N(-\theta_{*},I)$ where the weights $\delta_{*}$ and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-03-30 Nir Weinberger , Guy Bresler

Spatial generalized linear mixed models (SGLMMs) are popular and flexible models for non-Gaussian spatial data. They are useful for spatial interpolations as well as for fitting regression models that account for spatial dependence, and are…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-10-26 Yawen Guan , Murali Haran

Quantifying predictive uncertainty is essential for real world machine learning applications, especially in scenarios requiring reliable and interpretable predictions. Many common parametric approaches rely on neural networks to estimate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-31 Yang Yang , Chunlin Ji , Haoyang Li , Ke Deng

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

Mixture of linear regression is well studied in statistics and machine learning, where the data points are generated probabilistically using $k$ linear models. Algorithms like Expectation Maximization (EM) may be used to recover the ground…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Avishek Ghosh

The EM (Expectation-Maximization) algorithm is regarded as an MM (Majorization-Minimization) algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation of statistical models. Expanding this view, this paper demonstrates that by choosing an appropriate…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-12 Kensuke Asai , Jun-ya Gotoh

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-03 Iftekhar Naim , Daniel Gildea

In this paper, we outline the use of Mixture Models in density estimation of large astronomical databases. This method of density estimation has been known in Statistics for some time but has not been implemented because of the large…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 A. J. Connolly , C. Genovese , A. W. Moore , R. C. Nichol , J. Schneider , L. Wasserman

The expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm has been widely used in minimizing the negative log likelihood (also known as cross entropy) of mixture models. However, little is understood about the goodness of the fixed points it converges…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Guojun Zhang , Pascal Poupart , George Trimponias

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

Structural matrix-variate observations routinely arise in diverse fields such as multi-layer network analysis and brain image clustering. While data of this type have been extensively investigated with fruitful outcomes being delivered, the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-01-25 Zhongyuan Lyu , Dong Xia

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-16 Zhenisbek Assylbekov , Alan Legg , Artur Pak

Estimators derived from an EM algorithm are not robust since they are based on the maximization of the likelihood function. We propose a proximal-point algorithm based on the EM algorithm which aim to minimize a divergence criterion.…

Computation · Statistics 2016-07-11 Diaa Al Mohamad , Michel Broniatowski