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We study here a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) with rare events data. In this case, the commonly used Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm exhibits extremely slow numerical convergence rate. To theoretically understand this phenomenon, we…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-05-28 Xuetong Li , Jing Zhou , Hansheng Wang

The speed of convergence of the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm for Gaussian mixture model fitting is known to be dependent on the amount of overlap among the mixture components. In this paper, we study the impact of mixing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-03 Iftekhar Naim , Daniel Gildea

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-04-30 Raaz Dwivedi , Nhat Ho , Koulik Khamaru , Michael I. Jordan , Martin J. Wainwright , Bin Yu

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-24 Tongzheng Ren , Fuheng Cui , Sujay Sanghavi , Nhat Ho

We analyze the classical EM algorithm for parameter estimation in the symmetric two-component Gaussian mixtures in $d$ dimensions. We show that, even in the absence of any separation between components, provided that the sample size…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-08-30 Yihong Wu , Harrison H. Zhou

The EM (Expectation-Maximization) algorithm is regarded as an MM (Majorization-Minimization) algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation of statistical models. Expanding this view, this paper demonstrates that by choosing an appropriate…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-12 Kensuke Asai , Jun-ya Gotoh

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-26 Erixhen Sula , Lizhong Zheng

The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is an iterative method to maximize the log-likelihood function for parameter estimation. Previous works on the convergence analysis of the EM algorithm have established results on the asymptotic…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-05-31 Chong Wu , Can Yang , Hongyu Zhao , Ji Zhu

We consider maximum likelihood estimation for Gaussian Mixture Models (Gmms). This task is almost invariably solved (in theory and practice) via the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. EM owes its success to various factors, of which…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-04 Reshad Hosseini , Suvrit Sra

Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) are ubiquitous in statistical learning, particularly for unsupervised problems. While full GMMs suffer from the overparameterization of their covariance matrices in high-dimensional spaces, spherical GMMs…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-10 Tom Szwagier , Pierre-Alexandre Mattei , Charles Bouveyron , Xavier Pennec

The Gaussian mixture model (GMM) provides a simple yet principled framework for clustering, with properties suitable for statistical inference. In this paper, we propose a new model-based clustering algorithm, called EGMM (evidential GMM),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Lianmeng Jiao , Thierry Denoeux , Zhun-ga Liu , Quan Pan

The Expectation-Maximisation (EM) algorithm is a central tool in statistics and machine learning, widely used for latent-variable models such as Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). Despite its ubiquity, EM is typically treated as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Samuel Boïté , Eloi Tanguy , Julie Delon , Agnès Desolneux , Rémi Flamary

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…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-18 Geethu Joseph

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 give convergence guarantees for estimating the coefficients of a symmetric mixture of two linear regressions by expectation maximization (EM). In particular, we show that the empirical EM iterates converge to the target parameter vector…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-17 Jason M. Klusowski , Dana Yang , W. D. Brinda

In this paper, we study the problem of learning multi-dimensional Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs), with a specific focus on model order selection and efficient mixing distribution estimation. We first establish an information-theoretic lower…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-23 Xinyu Liu , Hai Zhang

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

Learning Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) is a fundamental problem in machine learning, with the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm and its popular variant gradient EM being arguably the most widely used algorithms in practice. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Mo Zhou , Weihang Xu , Maryam Fazel , Simon S. Du

Motivated by a recent result of Daskalakis et al. 2018, we analyze the population version of Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm for the case of \textit{truncated} mixtures of two Gaussians. Truncated samples from a $d$-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-12 Sai Ganesh Nagarajan , Ioannis Panageas

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