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Expectation Maximization (EM) is among the most popular algorithms for maximum likelihood estimation, but it is generally only guaranteed to find its stationary points of the log-likelihood objective. The goal of this article is to present…
Many Bayesian inference problems involve target distributions whose density functions are computationally expensive to evaluate. Replacing the target density with a local approximation based on a small number of carefully chosen density…
In this paper, a long-term survival model under competing risks is considered. The unobserved number of competing risks is assumed to follow a negative binomial distribution that can capture both over- and under-dispersion. Considering the…
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 graph-based active learning, algorithms based on expected error minimization (EEM) have been popular and yield good empirical performance. The exact computation of EEM optimally balances exploration and exploitation. In practice,…
Finite mixture models are among the most popular statistical models used in different data science disciplines. Despite their broad applicability, inference under these models typically leads to computationally challenging non-convex…
The Metropolis algorithm is a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm used to simulate from parameter distributions of interest, such as generalized linear model parameters. The "Metropolis step" is a keystone concept that underlies…
We develop an Evolutionary Markov Chain Monte Carlo (EMCMC) algorithm for sampling spatial partitions that lie within a large and complex spatial state space. Our algorithm combines the advantages of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) as…
Stochastic epidemic models provide an interpretable probabilistic description of the spread of a disease through a population. Yet, fitting these models to partially observed data is a notoriously difficult task due to intractability of the…
Several recent publications investigated Markov-chain modelling of linear optimization by a $(1,\lambda)$-ES, considering both unconstrained and linearly constrained optimization, and both constant and varying step size. All of them assume…
We present the particle stochastic approximation EM (PSAEM) algorithm for learning of dynamical systems. The method builds on the EM algorithm, an iterative procedure for maximum likelihood inference in latent variable models. By combining…
We define an optimal preconditioning for the Langevin diffusion by analytically optimizing the expected squared jumped distance. This yields as the optimal preconditioning an inverse Fisher information covariance matrix, where the…
In this work, we investigate stochastic approximation (SA) with Markovian data and nonlinear updates under constant stepsize $\alpha>0$. Existing work has primarily focused on either i.i.d. data or linear update rules. We take a new…
The Linear Ballistic Accumulator (Brown & Heathcote, 2008) model is used as a measurement tool to answer questions about applied psychology. The analyses based on this model depend upon the model selected and its estimated parameters.…
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…
The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is one of the most popular methods used to solve the problem of parametric distribution-based clustering in unsupervised learning. In this paper, we propose to analyze a generalized EM (GEM)…
We show how the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm can be applied exactly for the fitting of mixtures of general multivariate skew t (MST) distributions, eliminating the need for computationally expensive Monte Carlo estimation. Finite…
We propose Subsampling MCMC, a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) framework where the likelihood function for $n$ observations is estimated from a random subset of $m$ observations. We introduce a highly efficient unbiased estimator of the…
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…
Stochastic approximation is a framework unifying many random iterative algorithms occurring in a diverse range of applications. The stability of the process is often difficult to verify in practical applications and the process may even be…