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Mixture models are probabilistic models aimed at uncovering and representing latent subgroups within a population. In the realm of network data analysis, the latent subgroups of nodes are typically identified by their connectivity…
The Gaussian mixture model (GMM) provides a simple yet principled framework for clustering, with properties suitable for statistical inference. In this paper, we propose a new model-based clustering algorithm, called EGMM (evidential GMM),…
The performance of EM in learning mixtures of product distributions often depends on the initialization. This can be problematic in crowdsourcing and other applications, e.g. when a small number of 'experts' are diluted by a large number of…
We consider the problem of designing minimax estimators for estimating the parameters of a probability distribution. Unlike classical approaches such as the MLE and minimum distance estimators, we consider an algorithmic approach for…
(Neal and Hinton, 1998) recast maximum likelihood estimation of any given latent variable model as the minimization of a free energy functional $F$, and the EM algorithm as coordinate descent applied to $F$. Here, we explore alternative…
In this paper, we propose a generalization of the Batch Normalization (BN) algorithm, diminishing batch normalization (DBN), where we update the BN parameters in a diminishing moving average way. BN is very effective in accelerating the…
Deep energy-based models (EBMs) are very flexible in distribution parametrization but computationally challenging because of the intractable partition function. They are typically trained via maximum likelihood, using contrastive divergence…
We show that a large class of Estimation of Distribution Algorithms, including, but not limited to, Covariance Matrix Adaption, can be written as a Monte Carlo Expectation-Maximization algorithm, and as exact EM in the limit of infinite…
The Expectation Maximisation (EM) algorithm is widely used to optimise non-convex likelihood functions with latent variables. Many authors modified its simple design to fit more specific situations. For instance, the Expectation (E) step…
Training the parameters of statistical models to describe a given data set is a central task in the field of data mining and machine learning. A very popular and powerful way of parameter estimation is the method of maximum likelihood…
In training neural networks, it is common practice to use partial gradients computed over batches, mostly very small subsets of the training set. This approach is motivated by the argument that such a partial gradient is close to the true…
Aggregating multiple learners through an ensemble of models aim to make better predictions by capturing the underlying distribution of the data more accurately. Different ensembling methods, such as bagging, boosting, and stacking/blending,…
In recent years, model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) has become a popular research area. However, the stochastic optimization of MAML is still underdeveloped. Existing MAML algorithms rely on the ``episode'' idea by sampling a few tasks and…
The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm has been predominantly used to approximate the maximum likelihood estimation of the location-scale Gaussian mixtures. However, when the models are over-specified, namely, the chosen number of…
Expectation maximisation (EM) is usually thought of as an unsupervised learning method for estimating the parameters of a mixture distribution, however it can also be used for supervised learning when class labels are available. As such, EM…
As in other estimation scenarios, likelihood based estimation in the normal mixture set-up is highly non-robust against model misspecification and presence of outliers (apart from being an ill-posed optimization problem). A robust…
We study Bayesian inverse problems with mixed noise, modeled as a combination of additive and multiplicative Gaussian components. While traditional inference methods often assume fixed or known noise characteristics, real-world…
In this contribution, we propose a generic online (also sometimes called adaptive or recursive) version of the Expectation-Maximisation (EM) algorithm applicable to latent variable models of independent observations. Compared to the…
Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is a widely-used data analysis technique, and has yielded impressive results in many real-world tasks. Generally, existing NMF methods represent each sample with several centroids, and find the optimal…
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…