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This note aims to demonstrate that performing maximum-likelihood estimation for a mixture model is equivalent to minimizing over the parameters an optimal transport problem with entropic regularization. The objective is pedagogical: we seek…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-24 Titouan Vayer , Etienne Lasalle

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-03-29 Sida I. Wang , Arun Tejasvi Chaganty , Percy Liang

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

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.…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-01-17 Tao Huang , Heng Peng , Kun Zhang

This paper tackles the problem of missing data imputation for noisy and non-Gaussian data. A classical imputation method, the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm for Gaussian mixture models, has shown interesting properties when…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-23 Florian Mouret , Alexandre Hippert-Ferrer , Frédéric Pascal , Jean-Yves Tourneret

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

Expectation Maximization (EM) is the standard method to learn Gaussian mixtures. Yet its classic, centralized form is often infeasible, due to privacy concerns and computational and communication bottlenecks. Prior work dealt with data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-26 Pedro Valdeira , Cláudia Soares , João Xavier

Mixtures-of-Experts models and their maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) via the EM algorithm have been thoroughly studied in the statistics and machine learning literature. They are subject of a growing investigation in the context of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-13 Faïcel Chamroukhi , Florian Lecocq , Hien D. Nguyen

We take a new look at parameter estimation for Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). In particular, we propose using \emph{Riemannian manifold optimization} as a powerful counterpart to Expectation Maximization (EM). An out-of-the-box invocation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-26 Reshad Hosseini , Suvrit Sra

The Expectation--Maximization (EM) algorithm is a simple meta-algorithm that has been used for many years as a methodology for statistical inference when there are missing measurements in the observed data or when the data is composed of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-15 Hideitsu Hino , Shotaro Akaho , Noboru Murata

Learning Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) is a fundamental problem in machine learning, with the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm and its popular variant gradient EM being arguably the most widely used algorithms in practice. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Mo Zhou , Weihang Xu , Maryam Fazel , Simon S. Du

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

Parameter estimation in logistic regression is a well-studied problem with the Newton-Raphson method being one of the most prominent optimization techniques used in practice. A number of monotone optimization methods including…

Computation · Statistics 2023-04-11 Nicholas C. Henderson , Zhongzhe Ouyang

Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) are ubiquitous in statistical learning, particularly for unsupervised problems. While full GMMs suffer from the overparameterization of their covariance matrices in high-dimensional spaces, spherical GMMs…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-10 Tom Szwagier , Pierre-Alexandre Mattei , Charles Bouveyron , Xavier Pennec

In this letter, we revisit the problem of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of parameters of Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and show a new derivation for its parameters. The new derivation, unlike the classical approach employing the…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-01-10 Nitesh Sahu , Prabhu Babu

Multivariate normal mixtures provide a flexible model for high-dimensional data. They are widely used in statistical genetics, statistical finance, and other disciplines. Due to the unboundedness of the likelihood function, classical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2008-05-27 Jiahua Chen , Xianming Tan

We derive an asymptotic expansion for the log likelihood of Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) with equal covariance matrices in the low signal-to-noise regime. The expansion reveals an intimate connection between two types of algorithms for…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-06-30 Anya Katsevich , Afonso Bandeira

In this paper, we firstly give a brief introduction of expectation maximization (EM) algorithm, and then discuss the initial value sensitivity of expectation maximization algorithm. Subsequently, we give a short proof of EM's convergence.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-05-06 Fuqiang Chen

We study the optimization landscape of the log-likelihood function and the convergence of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm in latent Gaussian tree models, i.e. tree-structured Gaussian graphical models whose leaf nodes are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Yuval Dagan , Constantinos Daskalakis , Anthimos Vardis Kandiros

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