Related papers: Revisiting Incremental Stochastic Majorization-Min…
Majorization-minimization schemes are a broad class of iterative methods targeting general optimization problems, including nonconvex, nonsmooth and stochastic. These algorithms minimize successively a sequence of upper bounds of the…
The EM algorithm is a method for finding the maximum likelihood estimate of a model in the presence of missing data. Unfortunately, EM does not produce a parameter covariance matrix for standard errors. Supplemented EM (SEM; Meng & Rubin,…
The ability to generate samples of the random effects from their conditional distributions is fundamental for inference in mixed effects models. Random walk Metropolis is widely used to perform such sampling, but this method is known to…
The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a commonly used method for finding the maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters in a mixture model via coordinate ascent. A serious pitfall with the algorithm is that in the case of…
The expectation--maximization (EM) algorithm combines global monotonicity, local linear convergence, and strong practical robustness, but these features are usually analyzed separately. Global descent is nonlinear, whereas local convergence…
Mixtures of generalized normal distributions (MGND) have gained popularity for modelling datasets with complex statistical behaviours. However, the estimation of the shape parameter within the maximum likelihood framework is quite complex,…
The expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm introduced by Dempster et al in 1977 is a very general method to solve maximum likelihood estimation problems. In this informal report, we review the theory behind EM as well as a number of EM…
In a mixture of linear regression model, the regression coefficients are treated as random vectors that may follow either a continuous or discrete distribution. We propose two Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithms to estimate this prior…
In this work, we investigate Batch Normalization technique and propose its probabilistic interpretation. We propose a probabilistic model and show that Batch Normalization maximazes the lower bound of its marginalized log-likelihood. Then,…
Additive smooth models, such as Generalized additive models (GAMs) of location, scale, and shape (GAMLSS), are a popular choice for modeling experimental data. However, software available to fit such models is usually not tailored…
Influence Maximization (IM) is a classical combinatorial optimization problem, which can be widely used in mobile networks, social computing, and recommendation systems. It aims at selecting a small number of users such that maximizing 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…
This paper considers an approximate dynamic matrix factor model that accounts for the time series nature of the data by explicitly modelling the time evolution of the factors. We study estimation of the model parameters based on the…
This paper studies empirical risk minimization (ERM) problems for large-scale datasets and incorporates the idea of adaptive sample size methods to improve the guaranteed convergence bounds for first-order stochastic and deterministic…
We present a noise-injected version of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm: the Noisy Expectation Maximization (NEM) algorithm. The NEM algorithm uses noise to speed up the convergence of the EM algorithm. The NEM theorem shows that…
Multi-time-scale stochastic approximation is an iterative algorithm for finding the fixed point of a set of $N$ coupled operators given their noisy samples. It has been observed that due to the coupling between the decision variables and…
Stochastic optimization lies at the core of most statistical learning models. The recent great development of stochastic algorithmic tools focused significantly onto proximal gradient iterations, in order to find an efficient approach for…
Data augmentation improves the convergence of iterative algorithms, such as the EM algorithm and Gibbs sampler by introducing carefully designed latent variables. In this article, we first propose a data augmentation scheme for the…
Generalising the idea of the classical EM algorithm that is widely used for computing maximum likelihood estimates, we propose an EM-Control (EM-C) algorithm for solving multi-period finite time horizon stochastic control problems. The new…
Explainable boosting machines (EBMs) are popular "glass-box" models that learn a set of univariate functions using boosting trees. These achieve explainability through visualizations of each feature's effect. However, unlike linear model…