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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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-10 Xin Bing , Dehan Kong , Bingqing Li

We consider mixtures of $k\geq 2$ Gaussian components with unknown means and unknown covariance (identical for all components) that are well-separated, i.e., distinct components have statistical overlap at most $k^{-C}$ for a large enough…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Rares-Darius Buhai , David Steurer

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-16 Zhenisbek Assylbekov , Alan Legg , Artur Pak

We give an efficient algorithm for robustly clustering of a mixture of two arbitrary Gaussians, a central open problem in the theory of computationally efficient robust estimation, assuming only that the the means of the component Gaussians…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-06-02 He Jia , Santosh Vempala

In this paper, we study convergence properties of the gradient Expectation-Maximization algorithm \cite{lange1995gradient} for Gaussian Mixture Models for general number of clusters and mixing coefficients. We derive the convergence rate…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-12-05 Bowei Yan , Mingzhang Yin , Purnamrita Sarkar

In this paper, we study the problem of learning one-dimensional Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) with a specific focus on estimating both the model order and the mixing distribution from independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-24 Xinyu Liu , Hai Zhang

We use the Sum of Squares method to develop new efficient algorithms for learning well-separated mixtures of Gaussians and robust mean estimation, both in high dimensions, that substantially improve upon the statistical guarantees achieved…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-11-21 Samuel B. Hopkins , Jerry Li

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Babak Barazandeh , Meisam Razaviyayn

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

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

Clustering mixtures of Gaussian distributions is a fundamental and challenging problem that is ubiquitous in various high-dimensional data processing tasks. While state-of-the-art work on learning Gaussian mixture models has focused…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-05 Dan Kushnir , Shirin Jalali , Iraj Saniee

We give a polynomial-time algorithm for learning high-dimensional halfspaces with margins in $d$-dimensional space to within desired TV distance when the ambient distribution is an unknown affine transformation of the $d$-fold product of an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Xinyuan Cao , Santosh S. Vempala

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

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

We describe a general technique that yields the first {\em Statistical Query lower bounds} for a range of fundamental high-dimensional learning problems involving Gaussian distributions. Our main results are for the problems of (1) learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-18 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Alistair Stewart

Suppose that we are given independent, identically distributed samples $x_l$ from a mixture $\mu$ of no more than $k$ of $d$-dimensional spherical gaussian distributions $\mu_i$ with variance $1$, such that the minimum $\ell_2$ distance…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Somnath Chakraborty , Hariharan Narayanan

While several papers have investigated computationally and statistically efficient methods for learning Gaussian mixtures, precise minimax bounds for their statistical performance as well as fundamental limits in high-dimensional settings…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-06-11 Martin Azizyan , Aarti Singh , Larry Wasserman

Dasgupta and Shulman showed that a two-round variant of the EM algorithm can learn mixture of Gaussian distributions with near optimal precision with high probability if the Gaussian distributions are well separated and if the dimension is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-01-21 Adrian Barbu , Tianfu Wu , Ying Nian Wu

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

In this paper we show that very large mixtures of Gaussians are efficiently learnable in high dimension. More precisely, we prove that a mixture with known identical covariance matrices whose number of components is a polynomial of any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-19 Joseph Anderson , Mikhail Belkin , Navin Goyal , Luis Rademacher , James Voss