English
Related papers

Related papers: Nonparametric MLE for Gaussian Location Mixtures: …

200 papers

Mixture models are regularly used in density estimation applications, but the problem of estimating the mixing distribution remains a challenge. Nonparametric maximum likelihood produce estimates of the mixing distribution that are…

Computation · Statistics 2019-06-28 Minwoo Chae , Ryan Martin , Stephen G. Walker

The Wasserstein distance has emerged as a key metric to quantify distances between probability distributions, with applications in various fields, including machine learning, control theory, decision theory, and biological systems.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Eduardo Figueiredo , Steven Adams , Luca Laurenti

Mixtures of Gaussian (or normal) distributions arise in a variety of application areas. Many heuristics have been proposed for the task of finding the component Gaussians given samples from the mixture, such as the EM algorithm, a…

Probability · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Sanjeev Arora , Ravi Kannan

This paper deals with Elliptical Wishart distributions - which generalize the Wishart distribution - in the context of signal processing and machine learning. Two algorithms to compute the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) are proposed: a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-06 Imen Ayadi , Florent Bouchard , Frédéric Pascal

In this work, we investigate Gaussian Mixture Models ({\it abbrv} GMM) and the related problem of non parametric maximum likelihood estimation ({\it abbrv} NPMLE) from the perspective of statistical mechanics. In particular, we establish…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-03-25 Subhroshekhar Ghosh , Adityanand Guntuboyina , Satyaki Mukherjee , Hoang-Son Tran

Suppose we are given observations, where each observation is drawn independently from one of $k$ known distributions. The goal is to match each observation to the distribution from which it was drawn. We observe that the maximum likelihood…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-10-01 Sinho Chewi , Forest Yang , Avishek Ghosh , Abhay Parekh , Kannan Ramchandran

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

We study the problem of robustly estimating the mean or location parameter without moment assumptions. We show that for a large class of symmetric distributions, the same error as in the Gaussian setting can be achieved efficiently. The…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Gleb Novikov , David Steurer , Stefan Tiegel

Mixture models, such as Gaussian mixture models, are widely used in machine learning to represent complex data distributions. A key challenge, especially in high-dimensional settings, is to determine the mixture order and estimate the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-30 Srećko Đurašinović , Jean-Bernard Lasserre , Victor Magron

We consider the problem of spherical Gaussian Mixture models with $k \geq 3$ components when the components are well separated. A fundamental previous result established that separation of $\Omega(\sqrt{\log k})$ is necessary and sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Jeongyeol Kwon , Constantine Caramanis

We revisit the classical problem of deriving convergence rates for the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) in finite mixture models. The Wasserstein distance has become a standard loss function for the analysis of parameter estimation in…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-06-22 Tudor Manole , Nhat Ho

Hyperbolic space is increasingly used for hierarchical, tree-like, and network-structured data, but likelihood-based density modeling on hyperbolic space remains relatively limited. This paper develops finite mixture modeling with isotropic…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-29 Kisung You

Estimating mutual information (MI) from samples is a fundamental problem in statistics, machine learning, and data analysis. Recently it was shown that a popular class of non-parametric MI estimators perform very poorly for strongly…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-02-18 Shuyang Gao , Greg Ver Steeg , Aram Galstyan

Gaussian mixture models (GMM) are powerful parametric tools with many applications in machine learning and computer vision. Expectation maximization (EM) is the most popular algorithm for estimating the GMM parameters. However, EM…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-11-17 Soheil Kolouri , Gustavo K. Rohde , Heiko Hoffmann

The conditional independence assumption has recently appeared in a growing body of literature on the estimation of multivariate mixtures. We consider here conditionally independent multivariate mixtures of power series distributions with…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-09-09 Fadoua Balabdaoui , Harald Besdziek , Yong Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-29 Ji Xu , Daniel Hsu , Arian Maleki

We consider approximate maximum likelihood parameter estimation in nonlinear state-space models. We discuss both direct optimization of the likelihood and expectation--maximization (EM). For EM, we also give closed-form expressions for the…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-11-03 Juho Kokkala , Arno Solin , Simo Särkkä

Existing methods to summarize posterior inference for mixture models focus on identifying a point estimate of the implied random partition for clustering, with density estimation as a secondary goal (Wade and Ghahramani, 2018; Dahl et al.,…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-09 Khai Nguyen , Peter Mueller

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

Estimators derived from a divergence criterion such as $\varphi-$divergences are generally more robust than the maximum likelihood ones. We are interested in particular in the so-called MD$\varphi$DE, an estimator built using a dual…

Computation · Statistics 2016-06-14 Diaa Al Mohamad , Michel Broniatowski