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Gaussian mixture models (GMM) are the most widely used statistical model for the $k$-means clustering problem and form a popular framework for clustering in machine learning and data analysis. In this paper, we propose a natural semi-random…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-11-27 Pranjal Awasthi , Aravindan Vijayaraghavan

This paper studies the sample complexity of learning the $k$ unknown centers of a balanced Gaussian mixture model (GMM) in $\mathbb{R}^d$ with spherical covariance matrix $\sigma^2\mathbf{I}$. In particular, we are interested in the…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-06-15 Elad Romanov , Tamir Bendory , Or Ordentlich

One of the most popular algorithms for clustering in Euclidean space is the $k$-means algorithm; $k$-means is difficult to analyze mathematically, and few theoretical guarantees are known about it, particularly when the data is {\em…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2009-12-02 Kamalika Chaudhuri , Sanjoy Dasgupta , Andrea Vattani

We prove that $\tilde{\Theta}(k d^2 / \varepsilon^2)$ samples are necessary and sufficient for learning a mixture of $k$ Gaussians in $\mathbb{R}^d$, up to error $\varepsilon$ in total variation distance. This improves both the known upper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-23 Hassan Ashtiani , Shai Ben-David , Nick Harvey , Christopher Liaw , Abbas Mehrabian , Yaniv Plan

This work introduces a novel probabilistic deep learning technique called deep Gaussian mixture ensembles (DGMEs), which enables accurate quantification of both epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty. By assuming the data generating process…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-13 Yousef El-Laham , Niccolò Dalmasso , Elizabeth Fons , Svitlana Vyetrenko

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

We consider the problem of estimating the parameters a Gaussian Mixture Model with K components of known weights, all with an identity covariance matrix. We make two contributions. First, at the population level, we present a sharper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-24 Nimrod Segol , Boaz Nadler

We study the problem of learning general (i.e., not necessarily homogeneous) halfspaces with Random Classification Noise under the Gaussian distribution. We establish nearly-matching algorithmic and Statistical Query (SQ) lower bound…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Ilias Diakonikolas , Jelena Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Puqian Wang , Nikos Zarifis

We resolve one of the major outstanding problems in robust statistics. In particular, if $X$ is an evenly weighted mixture of two arbitrary $d$-dimensional Gaussians, we devise a polynomial time algorithm that given access to samples from…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Daniel M. Kane

We propose an Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) learning algorithm, based on our previous work of GMM expansion idea. The new algorithm brings more robustness and simplicity than classic Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. It also improves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-07 Weiguo Lu , Xuan Wu , Deng Ding , Gangnan Yuan

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

Generalised linear models for multi-class classification problems are one of the fundamental building blocks of modern machine learning tasks. In this manuscript, we characterise the learning of a mixture of $K$ Gaussians with generic means…

We provide an algorithm for properly learning mixtures of two single-dimensional Gaussians without any separability assumptions. Given $\tilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from an unknown mixture, our algorithm outputs a mixture that is…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-05-20 Constantinos Daskalakis , Gautam Kamath

We study the complexity of smoothed agnostic learning, recently introduced by~\cite{CKKMS24}, in which the learner competes with the best classifier in a target class under slight Gaussian perturbations of the inputs. Specifically, we focus…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane

We consider the well-studied problem of learning intersections of halfspaces under the Gaussian distribution in the challenging \emph{agnostic learning} model. Recent work of Diakonikolas et al. (2021) shows that any Statistical Query (SQ)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-11 Daniel Hsu , Clayton Sanford , Rocco Servedio , Emmanouil-Vasileios Vlatakis-Gkaragkounis

We study the problem of list-decodable Gaussian mean estimation and the related problem of learning mixtures of separated spherical Gaussians. We develop a set of techniques that yield new efficient algorithms with significantly improved…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-11-21 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Alistair Stewart

We revisit the problem of learning mixtures of spherical Gaussians. Given samples from mixture $\frac{1}{k}\sum_{j=1}^{k}\mathcal{N}(\mu_j, I_d)$, the goal is to estimate the means $\mu_1, \mu_2, \ldots, \mu_k \in \mathbb{R}^d$ up to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-07 Mingda Qiao , Guru Guruganesh , Ankit Singh Rawat , Avinava Dubey , Manzil Zaheer

We give a polynomial-time algorithm for the problem of robustly estimating a mixture of $k$ arbitrary Gaussians in $\mathbb{R}^d$, for any fixed $k$, in the presence of a constant fraction of arbitrary corruptions. This resolves the main…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Ainesh Bakshi , Ilias Diakonikolas , He Jia , Daniel M. Kane , Pravesh K. Kothari , Santosh S. Vempala

Unsupervised learning has been widely used in many real-world applications. One of the simplest and most important unsupervised learning models is the Gaussian mixture model (GMM). In this work, we study the multi-task learning problem on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-29 Ye Tian , Haolei Weng , Lucy Xia , Yang Feng

Since Pearson [Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. A, 185 (1894), pp. 71-110] first applied the method of moments (MM) for modeling data as a mixture of one-dimensional Gaussians, moment-based estimation methods have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Liu Zhang , Oscar Mickelin , Sheng Xu , Amit Singer