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We consider the branch-length estimation problem on a bifurcating tree: a character evolves along the edges of a binary tree according to a two-state symmetric Markov process, and we seek to recover the edge transition probabilities from…

Computation · Statistics 2025-07-30 David Clancy , Hanbaek Lyu , Sebastien Roch

We investigate the optimization landscape of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) for the Cavender-Farris-Neyman (CFN) model, a two-state latent tree model fundamental to statistical phylogenetics and the ferromagnetic Ising model. Although…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-22 David Clancy , Hanbaek Lyu , Sebastien Roch

Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a widely used iterative algorithm for computing (local) maximum likelihood estimate (MLE). It can be used in an extensive range of problems, including the clustering of data based on the Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-28 Pierre Houdouin , Esa Ollila , Frederic Pascal

The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a widely used method for maximum likelihood estimation in models with latent variables. For estimating mixtures of Gaussians, its iteration can be viewed as a soft version of the k-means…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-06-06 Constantinos Daskalakis , Christos Tzamos , Manolis Zampetakis

The EM algorithm is one of the most popular algorithm for inference in latent data models. The original formulation of the EM algorithm does not scale to large data set, because the whole data set is required at each iteration of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-29 Belhal Karimi , Hoi-To Wai , Eric Moulines , Marc Lavielle

The expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is an iterative method for finding maximum likelihood estimates when data are incomplete or are treated as being incomplete. The EM algorithm and its variants are commonly used for parameter…

Computation · Statistics 2013-06-26 Ryan P. Browne , Sanjeena Subedi , Paul McNicholas

Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a widely used iterative algorithm for computing maximum likelihood estimate when dealing with Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). When the sample size is smaller than the data dimension, this could lead…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-06 Pierre Houdouin , Matthieu Jonkcheere , Frederic Pascal

The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is widely used as an iterative modification to maximum likelihood estimation when the data is incomplete. We focus on a semi-supervised case to learn the model from labeled and unlabeled samples.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-26 Erixhen Sula , Lizhong Zheng

Expectation maximization (EM) is the default algorithm for fitting probabilistic models with missing or latent variables, yet we lack a full understanding of its non-asymptotic convergence properties. Previous works show results along the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Frederik Kunstner , Raunak Kumar , Mark Schmidt

Latent Gaussian models have a rich history in statistics and machine learning, with applications ranging from factor analysis to compressed sensing to time series analysis. The classical method for maximizing the likelihood of these models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Alexander Lin , Bahareh Tolooshams , Yves Atchadé , Demba Ba

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 investigate convergence of the expectation maximization algorithm by representing it as a generalized proximal method. Convergence of iterates and not just in value is investigated under natural hypotheses such as definability of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-06 Dominikus Noll

We study the gradient Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm for Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) in the over-parameterized setting, where a general GMM with $n>1$ components learns from data that are generated by a single ground truth…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Weihang Xu , Maryam Fazel , Simon S. Du

This work studies the location estimation problem for a mixture of two rotation invariant log-concave densities. We demonstrate that Least Squares EM, a variant of the EM algorithm, converges to the true location parameter from a randomly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-21 Wei Qian , Yuqian Zhang , Yudong Chen

The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm (Dempster, Laird and Rubin, 1977) is a popular method for computing maximum likelihood estimates (MLEs) in problems with missing data. Each iteration of the al- gorithm formally consists of an…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-06-22 Ronald C. Neath

The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is a versatile tool for model parameter estimation in latent data models. When processing large data sets or data stream however, EM becomes intractable since it requires the whole data set to be…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-10-18 Sylvain Le Corff , Gersende Fort

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

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-04-30 Raaz Dwivedi , Nhat Ho , Koulik Khamaru , Michael I. Jordan , Martin J. Wainwright , Bin Yu

We develop a nested EM routine for latent class models with covariates which allows maximization of the full-model log-likelihood and, differently from current methods, guarantees monotone log-likelihood sequences along with improved…

Computation · Statistics 2019-11-19 Daniele Durante , Antonio Canale , Tommaso Rigon

We study a class of weakly identifiable location-scale mixture models for which the maximum likelihood estimates based on $n$ i.i.d. samples are known to have lower accuracy than the classical $n^{- \frac{1}{2}}$ error. We investigate…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-11-17 Raaz Dwivedi , Nhat Ho , Koulik Khamaru , Martin J. Wainwright , Michael I. Jordan , Bin Yu