Related papers: Efficient and Accurate Learning of Mixtures of Pla…
Mixture models serve as one fundamental tool with versatile applications. However, their training techniques, like the popular Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, are notoriously sensitive to parameter initialization and often suffer…
Initialisation of the EM algorithm in model-based clustering is often crucial. Various starting points in the parameter space often lead to different local maxima of the likelihood function and, so to different clustering partitions. Among…
Finite mixture models have been widely used for the modelling and analysis of data from heterogeneous populations. Maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters is typically carried out via the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. The…
(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…
Regression mixture models are widely studied in statistics, machine learning and data analysis. Fitting regression mixtures is challenging and is usually performed by maximum likelihood by using the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm.…
The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a fundamental tool in unsupervised machine learning. It is often used as an efficient way to solve Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation problems, especially for models with latent variables. It…
Mixture of Experts (MoE) are successful models for modeling heterogeneous data in many statistical learning problems including regression, clustering and classification. Generally fitted by maximum likelihood estimation via the well-known…
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…
The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a commonly used method for finding the maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters in a mixture model via coordinate ascent. A serious pitfall with the algorithm is that in the case of…
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…
Finite mixture models are powerful tools for modelling and analyzing heterogeneous data. Parameter estimation is typically carried out using maximum likelihood estimation via the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. Recently, the…
The convergence of expectation-maximization (EM)-based algorithms typically requires continuity of the likelihood function with respect to all the unknown parameters (optimization variables). The requirement is not met when parameters…
The expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm and its variants are widely used in statistics. In high-dimensional mixture linear regression, the model is assumed to be a finite mixture of linear regression and the number of predictors is much…
Recent work has proposed stochastic Plackett-Luce (PL) ranking models as a robust choice for optimizing relevance and fairness metrics. Unlike their deterministic counterparts that require heuristic optimization algorithms, PL models are…
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.…
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…
Latent class model (LCM), which is a finite mixture of different categorical distributions, is one of the most widely used models in statistics and machine learning fields. Because of its non-continuous nature and the flexibility in shape,…
In this paper we address the identifiability and efficient learning problems of finite mixtures of Plackett-Luce models for rank data. We prove that for any $k\geq 2$, the mixture of $k$ Plackett-Luce models for no more than $2k-1$…
Choice behavior and preferences typically involve numerous and subjective aspects that are difficult to be identified and quantified. For this reason, their exploration is frequently conducted through the collection of ordinal evidence in…
Expectation Maximization (EM) is among the most popular algorithms for estimating parameters of statistical models. However, EM, which is an iterative algorithm based on the maximum likelihood principle, is generally only guaranteed to find…