Related papers: Convergence of the EM algorithm via proximal techn…
The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is routinely used for the maximum likelihood estimation in the latent class analysis. However, the EM algorithm comes with no guarantees of reaching the global optimum. We study the geometry of…
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)…
Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) are fundamental statistical tools for modeling heterogeneous data. Due to the nonconcavity of the likelihood function, the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is widely used for parameter estimation of…
The proximal gradient algorithm for minimizing the sum of a smooth and a nonsmooth convex function often converges linearly even without strong convexity. One common reason is that a multiple of the step length at each iteration may…
We develop a general framework for proving rigorous guarantees on the performance of the EM algorithm and a variant known as gradient EM. Our analysis is divided into two parts: a treatment of these algorithms at the population level (in…
The EM algorithm is a generic tool that offers maximum likelihood solutions when datasets are incomplete with data values missing at random or completely at random. At least for its simplest form, the algorithm can be rewritten in terms of…
Mixture models serve as one fundamental tool with versatile applications. However, their training techniques, like the popular Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, are notoriously sensitive to parameter initialization and often suffer…
We investigate the convergence properties of the EM algorithm when applied to overspecified Gaussian mixture models -- that is, when the number of components in the fitted model exceeds that of the true underlying distribution. Focusing on…
Theoretical guarantees are established for a standard estimator in a semi-parametric finite mixture model, where each component density is modeled as a product of univariate densities under a conditional independence assumption. The focus…
In this contribution, we propose a generic online (also sometimes called adaptive or recursive) version of the Expectation-Maximisation (EM) algorithm applicable to latent variable models of independent observations. Compared to the…
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…
Analysis of the convergence rates of modern convex optimization algorithms can be achived through binary means: analysis of emperical convergence, or analysis of theoretical convergence. These two pathways of capturing information diverge…
We investigate the techniques and ideas used in the convergence analysis of two proximal ADMM algorithms for solving convex optimization problems involving compositions with linear operators. Besides this, we formulate a variant of the ADMM…
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…
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…
The EM algorithm is a powerful tool for maximum likelihood estimation with missing data. In practice, the calculations required for the EM algorithm are often intractable. We review numerous methods to circumvent this intractability, all of…
A method that uses order statistics to construct multivariate distributions with fixed marginals and which utilizes a representation of the Bernstein copula in terms of a finite mixture distribution is proposed. Expectation-maximization…
We propose a new modified primal-dual proximal best approximation method for solving convex not necessarily differentiable optimization problems. The novelty of the method relies on introducing memory by taking into account iterates…
This note aims to demonstrate that performing maximum-likelihood estimation for a mixture model is equivalent to minimizing over the parameters an optimal transport problem with entropic regularization. The objective is pedagogical: we seek…
Fast Incremental Expectation Maximization (FIEM) is a version of the EM framework for large datasets. In this paper, we first recast FIEM and other incremental EM type algorithms in the {\em Stochastic Approximation within EM} framework.…