Related papers: EM algorithms for optimization problems with polyn…
(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…
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.…
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…
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…
The EM algorithm is a special case of a more general algorithm called the MM algorithm. Specific MM algorithms often have nothing to do with missing data. The first M step of an MM algorithm creates a surrogate function that is optimized in…
Expectation maximization (EM) is a technique for estimating maximum-likelihood parameters of a latent variable model given observed data by alternating between taking expectations of sufficient statistics, and maximizing the expected log…
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…
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…
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 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…
We study a class of nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems in which the objective is a sum of two functions: One function is the average of a large number of differentiable functions, while the other function is proper, lower…
The Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is a flexible iterative procedure used to solve non-linear least squares problems. In this work we study how a class of possible adaptations of this procedure can be used to solve maximum likelihood…
Finding a large set of optima in a multimodal optimization landscape is a challenging task. Classical population-based evolutionary algorithms typically converge only to a single solution. While this can be counteracted by applying niching…
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…
We develop a family of accelerated stochastic algorithms that minimize sums of convex functions. Our algorithms improve upon the fastest running time for empirical risk minimization (ERM), and in particular linear least-squares regression,…
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…
We present a new framework for analysing the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. Drawing on recent advances in the theory of gradient flows over Euclidean-Wasserstein spaces, we extend techniques from alternating minimization in…
The Expectation-Maximization algorithm is perhaps the most broadly used algorithm for inference of latent variable problems. A theoretical understanding of its performance, however, largely remains lacking. Recent results established that…
In recent years, there is a growing need to train machine learning models on a huge volume of data. Designing efficient distributed optimization algorithms for empirical risk minimization (ERM) has therefore become an active and challenging…
The methods of statistical physics are widely used for modelling complex networks. Building on the recently proposed Equilibrium Expectation approach, we derive a simple and efficient algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of…