Mixture distributions arise in many parametric and non-parametric settings -- for example, in Gaussian mixture models and in non-parametric estimation. It is often necessary to compute the entropy of a mixture, but, in most cases, this quantity has no closed-form expression, making some form of approximation necessary. We propose a family of estimators based on a pairwise distance function between mixture components, and show that this estimator class has many attractive properties. For many distributions of interest, the proposed estimators are efficient to compute, differentiable in the mixture parameters, and become exact when the mixture components are clustered. We prove this family includes lower and upper bounds on the mixture entropy. The Chernoff $α$-divergence gives a lower bound when chosen as the distance function, with the Bhattacharyya distance providing the tightest lower bound for components that are symmetric and members of a location family. The Kullback-Leibler divergence gives an upper bound when used as the distance function. We provide closed-form expressions of these bounds for mixtures of Gaussians, and discuss their applications to the estimation of mutual information. We then demonstrate that our bounds are significantly tighter than well-known existing bounds using numeric simulations. This estimator class is very useful in optimization problems involving maximization/minimization of entropy and mutual information, such as MaxEnt and rate distortion problems.
In this article we propose novel Bayesian nonparametric methods using Dirichlet Process Mixture (DPM) models for detecting pairwise dependence between random variables while accounting for uncertainty in the form of the underlying distributions. A key criteria is that the procedures should scale to large data sets. In this regard we find that the formal calculation of the Bayes factor for a dependent-vs.-independent DPM joint probability measure is not feasible computationally. To address this we present Bayesian diagnostic measures for characterising evidence against a "null model" of pairwis…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）
In applications such as rank aggregation, mixture models for permutations are frequently used when the population exhibits heterogeneity. In this work, we study the widely used Mallows mixture model. In the high-dimensional setting, we propose a polynomial-time algorithm that learns a Mallows mixture of permutations on $n$ elements with the optimal sample complexity that is proportional to $\log n$, improving upon previous results that scale polynomially with $n$. In the high-noise regime, we characterize the optimal dependency of the sample complexity on the noise parameter. Both objectives a…
A new approach on the joint estimation of partially exchangeable observations is presented by constructing pairwise dependence between $m$ random density functions, each of which is modeled as a mixture of geometric stick breaking processes. This approach is based on a new random central masses version of the Pairwise Dependent Dirichlet Process prior mixture model (PDDP) first introduced in Hatjispyros et al. (2011). The idea is to create pairwise dependence through random measures that are location-preserving-expectations of Dirichlet random measures. Our contention is that mixture modeling …
Max-mixture processes are defined as Z = max(aX, (1 -- a)Y) with X an asymptotic dependent (AD) process, Y an asymptotic independent (AI) process and a $\in$ [0, 1]. So that, the mixing coefficient a may reveal the strength of the AD part present in the max-mixture process. In this paper we focus on two tests based on censored pairwise likelihood estimates. We compare their performance through an extensive simulation study. Monte Carlo simulation plays a fundamental tool for asymptotic variance calculations. We apply our tests to daily precipitations from the East of Australia. Drawbacks and p…
Mixture modeling, which considers the potential heterogeneity in data, is widely adopted for classification and clustering problems. Mixture models can be estimated using the Expectation-Maximization algorithm, which works with the complete estimating equations conditioned by the latent membership variables of the cluster assignment based on the hierarchical expression of mixture models. However, when the mixture components have light tails such as a normal distribution, the mixture model can be sensitive to outliers. This study proposes a method of weighted complete estimating equations (WCE)…
Estimation of the number of components (or order) of a finite mixture model is a long standing and challenging problem in statistics. We propose the Group-Sort-Fuse (GSF) procedure -- a new penalized likelihood approach for simultaneous estimation of the order and mixing measure in multidimensional finite mixture models. Unlike methods which fit and compare mixtures with varying orders using criteria involving model complexity, our approach directly penalizes a continuous function of the model parameters. More specifically, given a conservative upper bound on the order, the GSF groups and sort…
Recently, a general method for analyzing the statistical accuracy of the EM algorithm has been developed and applied to some simple latent variable models [Balakrishnan et al. 2016]. In that method, the basin of attraction for valid initialization is required to be a ball around the truth. Using Stein's Lemma, we extend these results in the case of estimating the centers of a two-component Gaussian mixture in $d$ dimensions. In particular, we significantly expand the basin of attraction to be the intersection of a half space and a ball around the origin. If the signal-to-noise ratio is at leas…
Discriminative latent-variable models are typically learned using EM or gradient-based optimization, which suffer from local optima. In this paper, we develop a new computationally efficient and provably consistent estimator for a mixture of linear regressions, a simple instance of a discriminative latent-variable model. Our approach relies on a low-rank linear regression to recover a symmetric tensor, which can be factorized into the parameters using a tensor power method. We prove rates of convergence for our estimator and provide an empirical evaluation illustrating its strengths relative t…
The problem of estimating the ratio of the means of a two-component Poisson mixture model is considered, when each component is subject to zero-inflation, i.e., excess zero counts. The. resulting {\it zero-inflated Poisson mixture (ZIPM) model} can be treated as a three-component Poisson mixture model with one degenerate component. The EM algorithm is applied to obtain frequentist estimators and their standard errors, the latter determined via an explicit expression for the observed information matrix. Bayes and empirical Bayes estimators also are obtained by means of conjugate priors and thei…
Mixture modeling is a general technique for making any simple model more expressive through weighted combination. This generality and simplicity in part explains the success of the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, in which updates are easy to derive for a wide class of mixture models. However, the likelihood of a mixture model is non-convex, so EM has no known global convergence guarantees. Recently, method of moments approaches offer global guarantees for some mixture models, but they do not extend easily to the range of mixture models that exist. In this work, we present Polymom, an …
BIC criterion is widely used by the neural-network community for model selection tasks, although its convergence properties are not always theoretically established. In this paper we will focus on estimating the number of components in a mixture of multilayer perceptrons and proving the convergence of the BIC criterion in this frame. The penalized marginal-likelihood for mixture models and hidden Markov models introduced by Keribin (2000) and, respectively, Gassiat (2002) is extended to mixtures of multilayer perceptrons for which a penalized-likelihood criterion is proposed. We prove its conv…
Estimation of finite mixture models when the mixing distribution support is unknown is an important problem. This paper gives a new approach based on a marginal likelihood for the unknown support. Motivated by a Bayesian Dirichlet prior model, a computationally efficient stochastic approximation version of the marginal likelihood is proposed and large-sample theory is presented. By restricting the support to a finite grid, a simulated annealing method is employed to maximize the marginal likelihood and estimate the support. Real and simulated data examples show that this novel stochastic appro…
CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数学与信息科学研究所）
A novel method for estimating Bayesian network (BN) parameters from data is presented which provides improved performance on test data. Previous research has shown the value of representing conditional probability distributions (CPDs) via neural networks(Neal 1992), noisy-OR gates (Neal 1992, Diez 1993)and decision trees (Friedman and Goldszmidt 1996).The Bernoulli mixture network (BMN) explicitly represents the CPDs of discrete BN nodes as mixtures of local distributions,each having a different set of parents.This increases the space of possible structures which can be considered,enabling the…
This paper provides a framework for estimating the mean and variance of a high-dimensional normal density. The main setting considered is a fixed number of vector following a high-dimensional normal distribution with unknown mean and diagonal covariance matrix. The diagonal covariance matrix can be known or unknown. If the covariance matrix is unknown, the sample size can be as small as $2$. The proposed estimator is based on the idea that the unobserved pairs of mean and variance for each dimension are drawn from an unknown bivariate distribution, which we model as a mixture of normal-inverse…
Purdue University（普渡大学）；North Carolina State University（北卡罗来纳州立大学）
Estimating parameters of mixture model has wide applications ranging from classification problems to estimating of complex distributions. Most of the current literature on estimating the parameters of the mixture densities are based on iterative Expectation Maximization (EM) type algorithms which require the use of either taking expectations over the latent label variables or generating samples from the conditional distribution of such latent labels using the Bayes rule. Moreover, when the number of components is unknown, the problem becomes computationally more demanding due to well-known lab…
Humans are routinely exposed to mixtures of chemical and other environmental factors, making the quantification of health effects associated with environmental mixtures a critical goal for establishing environmental policy sufficiently protective of human health. The quantification of the effects of exposure to an environmental mixture poses several statistical challenges. It is often the case that exposure to multiple pollutants interact with each other to affect an outcome. Further, the exposure-response relationship between an outcome and some exposures, such as some metals, can exhibit com…
In food science, it is of great interest to get information about the temporal perception of aliments to create new products, to modify existing ones or more generally to understand the perception mechanisms. Temporal Dominance of Sensations (TDS) is a technique to measure temporal perception which consists in choosing sequentially attributes describing a food product over tasting. This work introduces new statistical models based on finite mixtures of semi-Markov chains in order to describe data collected with the TDS protocol, allowing different temporal perceptions for a same product within…
Patra and Sen (2016) consider a two-component mixture model, where one component plays the role of background while the other plays the role of signal, and propose to estimate the background component by simply "maximizing" its weight. While in their work the background component is a completely known distribution, we extend their approach here to three emblematic settings: when the background distribution is symmetric; when it is monotonic; and when it is log-concave. In each setting, we derive estimators for the background component, establish consistency, and provide a confidence band. Whil…
Finite Mixtures of Generalized Estimating Equations for Clustering Multivariate Correlated Outcomes
Faculty of Economics, Keio University（庆应义塾大学经济学部）；Research School of Finance, Actuarial Studies and Statistics, The Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学金融、精算与统计研究学院）
Successful management of wildlife populations requires accurate estimates of abundance. Abundance estimates can be confounded by imperfect detection during wildlife surveys. N-mixture models enable quantification of detection probability and, under appropriate conditions, produce abundance estimates that are less biased. Here, we demonstrate use of the R-INLA package for R to analyze N-mixture models and compare performance of R-INLA to two other common approaches: JAGS (via the runjags package for R), which uses Markov chain Monte Carlo and allows Bayesian inference, and the unmarked package …
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
We present a Dirichlet process mixture model over discrete incomplete rankings and study two Gibbs sampling inference techniques for estimating posterior clusterings. The first approach uses a slice sampling subcomponent for estimating cluster parameters. The second approach marginalizes out several cluster parameters by taking advantage of approximations to the conditional posteriors. We empirically demonstrate (1) the effectiveness of this approximation for improving convergence, (2) the benefits of the Dirichlet process model over alternative clustering techniques for ranked data, and (3) t…
Maternal exposure to environmental chemicals during pregnancy can alter birth and children's health outcomes. Research seeks to identify critical windows, time periods when the exposures can change future health outcomes, and estimate the exposure-response relationship. Existing statistical approaches focus on estimation of the association between maternal exposure to a single environmental chemical observed at high-temporal resolution, such as weekly throughout pregnancy, and children's health outcomes. Extending to multiple chemicals observed at high temporal resolution poses a dimensionalit…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学）
We develop a general method for estimating a finite mixture of non-normalized models. Here, a non-normalized model is defined to be a parametric distribution with an intractable normalization constant. Existing methods for estimating non-normalized models without computing the normalization constant are not applicable to mixture models because they contain more than one intractable normalization constant. The proposed method is derived by extending noise contrastive estimation (NCE), which estimates non-normalized models by discriminating between the observed data and some artificially generat…
We develop a Gaussian-process mixture model for heterogeneous treatment effect estimation that leverages the use of transformed outcomes. The approach we will present attempts to improve point estimation and uncertainty quantification relative to past work that has used transformed variable related methods as well as traditional outcome modeling. Earlier work on modeling treatment effect heterogeneity using transformed outcomes has relied on tree based methods such as single regression trees and random forests. Under the umbrella of non-parametric models, outcome modeling has been performed us…
In recent years, multiple hypothesis testing has come to the forefront of statistical research, ostensibly in relation to applications in genomics and some other emerging fields. The false discovery rate (FDR) and its variants provide very important notions of errors in this context comparable to the role of error probabilities in classical testing problems. Accurate estimation of positive FDR (pFDR), a variant of the FDR, is essential in assessing and controlling this measure. In a recent paper, the authors proposed a model-based nonparametric Bayesian method of estimation of the pFDR functio…
Investigation of species abundance has become a vital component of many ecological monitoring studies. The primary objective of these studies is to understand how specific species are distributed across the study domain, as well as quantification of the sampling efficiency for detecting these species. To achieve these goals, preselected locations are sampled during scheduled visits, in which the number of species observed at each location is recorded. This results in spatially referenced replicated count data that are often unbalanced in structure and exhibit overdispersion. Motivated by the B…
Feature selection can facilitate the learning of mixtures of discrete random variables as they arise, e.g. in crowdsourcing tasks. Intuitively, not all workers are equally reliable but, if the less reliable ones could be eliminated, then learning should be more robust. By analogy with Gaussian mixture models, we seek a low-order statistical approach, and here introduce an algorithm based on the (pairwise) mutual information. This induces an order over workers that is well structured for the `one coin' model. More generally, it is justified by a goodness-of-fit measure and is validated empirica…
The number of species can be estimated by sampling individuals from a species assemblage. The problem of estimating generalized species accumulation curve is addressed in a nonparametric Poisson mixture model. A likelihood-based estimator is proposed and illustrated by real examples.
Estimating the number of household TV profiles based in customer behaviour using Gaussian mixture model averaging
Hamilton Institute, Maynooth University（马尼特大学哈密尔顿研究所）；Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Maynooth University（马尼特大学数学与统计学系）；Ulster University（乌斯特大学）；British Telecommunications（英国电信）
We propose a hierarchical Bayesian model to estimate the proportional contribution of source populations to a newly founded colony. Samples are derived from the first generation offspring in the colony, but mating may occur preferentially among migrants from the same source population. Genotypes of the newly founded colony and source populations are used to estimate the mixture proportions, and the mixture proportions are related to environmental and demographic factors that might affect the colonizing process. We estimate an assortative mating coefficient, mixture proportions, and regression …
HRL Laboratories, LLC（HRL实验室有限责任公司）；University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）
Gaussian mixture models (GMM) are powerful parametric tools with many applications in machine learning and computer vision. Expectation maximization (EM) is the most popular algorithm for estimating the GMM parameters. However, EM guarantees only convergence to a stationary point of the log-likelihood function, which could be arbitrarily worse than the optimal solution. Inspired by the relationship between the negative log-likelihood function and the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, we propose an alternative formulation for estimating the GMM parameters using the sliced Wasserstein distance, …
La Trobe University（拉筹伯大学）；Normandie Universite（诺曼底大学）；UNICAEN（卡昂大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）
Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models are a powerful paradigm for modeling of data arising from complex data generating processes (DGPs). In this article, we demonstrate how different MoE models can be constructed to approximate the underlying DGPs of arbitrary types of data. Due to the probabilistic nature of MoE models, we propose the maximum quasi-likelihood (MQL) estimator as a method for estimating MoE model parameters from data, and we provide conditions under which MQL estimators are consistent and asymptotically normal. The blockwise minorization-maximizatoin (blockwise-MM) algorithm framewo…
Ben-Gurion University（本-古里安大学）；Weizmann Institute of Science（魏茨曼科学研究所）
We present a novel approach for learning an HMM whose outputs are distributed according to a parametric family. This is done by {\em decoupling} the learning task into two steps: first estimating the output parameters, and then estimating the hidden states transition probabilities. The first step is accomplished by fitting a mixture model to the output stationary distribution. Given the parameters of this mixture model, the second step is formulated as the solution of an easily solvable convex quadratic program. We provide an error analysis for the estimated transition probabilities and show t…
Air Force Institute of Technology（空军理工学院）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
We introduce a model-free relax-and-round algorithm for k-means clustering based on a semidefinite relaxation due to Peng and Wei. The algorithm interprets the SDP output as a denoised version of the original data and then rounds this output to a hard clustering. We provide a generic method for proving performance guarantees for this algorithm, and we analyze the algorithm in the context of subgaussian mixture models. We also study the fundamental limits of estimating Gaussian centers by k-means clustering in order to compare our approximation guarantee to the theoretically optimal k-means clu…
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 depending on the mixing coefficients, minimum and maximum pairwise distances between the true centers and dimensionality and number of components; and obtain a near-optimal local contraction radius. While there have been some recent notable works that derive local convergence rates for EM in the two equal mixture symmetric GMM, in the more general case, the de…
A constructive proof of identification of multilinear decompositions of multiway arrays is presented. It can be applied to show identification in a variety of multivariate latent structures. Examples are finite-mixture models and hidden Markov models. The key step to show identification is the joint diagonalization of a set of matrices in the same nonorthogonal basis. An estimator of the latent-structure model may then be based on a sample version of this joint-diagonalization problem. Algorithms are available for computation and we derive distribution theory. We further develop asymptotic the…
Mixture models are probabilistic models aimed at uncovering and representing latent subgroups within a population. In the realm of network data analysis, the latent subgroups of nodes are typically identified by their connectivity behaviour, with nodes behaving similarly belonging to the same community. In this context, mixture modelling is pursued through stochastic blockmodelling. We consider stochastic blockmodels and some of their variants and extensions from a mixture modelling perspective. We also survey some of the main classes of estimation methods available, and propose an alternative…
We propose an extension of non-parametric multivariate finite mixture models by dropping the standard conditional independence assumption and incorporating the independent component analysis (ICA) structure instead. We formulate an objective function in terms of penalized smoothed Kullback Leibler distance and introduce the nonlinear smoothed majorization-minimization independent component analysis (NSMM-ICA) algorithm for optimizing this function and estimating the model parameters. We have implemented a practical version of this algorithm, which utilizes the FastICA algorithm, in the R packa…
As the global HIV pandemic enters its fourth decade, increasing numbers of surveillance sites have been established which allows countries to look into the epidemics at a finer scale, e.g. at sub-national levels. Currently, the epidemic models have been applied independently to the sub-national areas within countries. However, the availability and quality of the data vary widely, which leads to biased and unreliable estimates for areas with very few data. We propose to overcome this issue by introducing the dependence of the parameters across areas in a mixture model. The joint distribution of…
We study three different quasi-symmetry models and three different mixture models of $n\times n\times n$ tensors for modeling rater agreement data. For these models we give a geometric description of the associated varieties and we study their invariants distinguishing between the case $n=2$ and the case $n>2$. Finally, for the two models for pairwise agreement we state some results about the pairwise Cohen's $κ$ coefficients.
University of California, Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）；Microsoft Research New England（微软新英格兰研究院）
Mixture models are a fundamental tool in applied statistics and machine learning for treating data taken from multiple subpopulations. The current practice for estimating the parameters of such models relies on local search heuristics (e.g., the EM algorithm) which are prone to failure, and existing consistent methods are unfavorable due to their high computational and sample complexity which typically scale exponentially with the number of mixture components. This work develops an efficient method of moments approach to parameter estimation for a broad class of high-dimensional mixture models…
Active Preference Learning over Latent Preference Archetypes for Many-Objective Bayesian Optimization
University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；ELLIS Institute Finland（芬兰ELLIS研究所）
We study modeling and inference with the Elliptical Gamma Distribution (EGD). We consider maximum likelihood (ML) estimation for EGD scatter matrices, a task for which we develop new fixed-point algorithms. Our algorithms are efficient and converge to global optima despite nonconvexity. Moreover, they turn out to be much faster than both a well-known iterative algorithm of Kent & Tyler (1991) and sophisticated manifold optimization algorithms. Subsequently, we invoke our ML algorithms as subroutines for estimating parameters of a mixture of EGDs. We illustrate our methods by applying them to m…
We study the problem of estimating the covariance parameters of a one-dimensional Gaussian process with exponential covariance function under fixed-domain asymptotics. We show that the weighted pairwise maximum likelihood estimator of the microergodic parameter can be consistent or inconsistent. This depends on the range of admissible parameter values in the likelihood optimization. On the other hand, the weighted pairwise conditional maximum likelihood estimator is always consistent. Both estimators are also asymptotically Gaussian when they are consistent. Their asymptotic variances are larg…
Brown's 1971 paper "Admissible estimators, recurrent diffusions and insoluble boundary value problems" is a landmark in the admissibility literature. It nearly completely settles the issue of admissibility/inadmissibility for estimating the mean of a multivariate normal distribution with identity covariance under sum of squared error loss. We revisit this wonderful tour de force on its 50th anniversary and present an alternative and more direct proof of the result for generalized Bayes estimators corresponding to priors which are a subclass of scale mixtures of spherical normals.
Setting initial values of parameters of mixture distributions estimated by using the EM recursive algorithm is very important to the overall quality of estimation. None of the existing methods is suitable for mixtures with large number of components. We present a relevant methodology of estimating initial values of parameters of univariate, heteroscedastic Gaussian mixtures, on the basis of the dynamic programming algorithm for partitioning the range of observations into bins. We evaluate variants of dynamic programming method corresponding to different scoring functions for partitioning. For …
We consider the problem of estimating means of two Gaussians in a 2-Gaussian mixture, which is not balanced and is corrupted by noise of an arbitrary distribution. We present a robust algorithm to estimate the parameters, together with upper bounds on the numbers of samples required for the estimate to be correct, where the bounds are parametrised by the dimension, ratio of the mixing coefficients, a measure of the separation of the two Gaussians, related to Mahalanobis distance, and a condition number of the covariance matrix. In theory, this is the first sample-complexity result for imbalanc…
Estimating the model evidence - or mariginal likelihood of the data - is a notoriously difficult task for finite and infinite mixture models and we reexamine here different Monte Carlo techniques advocated in the recent literature, as well as novel approaches based on Geyer (1994) reverse logistic regression technique, Chib (1995) algorithm, and Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC). Applications are numerous. In particular, testing for the number of components in a finite mixture model or against the fit of a finite mixture model for a given dataset has long been and still is an issue of much interest…
