Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) are fundamental tools in statistical and data sciences. We study the moments of multivariate Gaussians and GMMs. The $d$-th moment of an $n$-dimensional random variable is a symmetric $d$-way tensor of size $n^d$, so working with moments naively is assumed to be prohibitively expensive for $d>2$ and larger values of $n$. In this work, we develop theory and numerical methods for \emph{implicit computations} with moment tensors of GMMs, reducing the computational and storage costs to $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ and $\mathcal{O}(n^3)$, respectively, for general covariance matrices, and to $\mathcal{O}(n)$ and $\mathcal{O}(n)$, respectively, for diagonal ones. We derive concise analytic expressions for the moments in terms of symmetrized tensor products, relying on the correspondence between symmetric tensors and homogeneous polynomials, and combinatorial identities involving Bell polynomials. The primary application of this theory is to estimating GMM parameters (means and covariances) from a set of observations, when formulated as a moment-matching optimization problem. If there is a known and common covariance matrix, we also show it is possible to debias the data observations, in which case the problem of estimating the unknown means reduces to symmetric CP tensor decomposition. Numerical results validate and illustrate the numerical efficiency of our approaches. This work potentially opens the door to the competitiveness of the method of moments as compared to expectation maximization methods for parameter estimation of GMMs.
We propose a new algorithm for tensor decomposition, based on Jennrich's algorithm, and apply our new algorithmic ideas to blind deconvolution and Gaussian mixture models. Our first contribution is a simple and efficient algorithm to decompose certain symmetric overcomplete order-3 tensors, that is, three dimensional arrays of the form $T = \sum_{i=1}^n a_i \otimes a_i \otimes a_i$ where the $a_i$s are not linearly independent.Our algorithm comes with a detailed robustness analysis. Our second contribution builds on top of our tensor decomposition algorithm to expand the family of Gaussian mix…
This work provides a computationally efficient and statistically consistent moment-based estimator for mixtures of spherical Gaussians. Under the condition that component means are in general position, a simple spectral decomposition technique yields consistent parameter estimates from low-order observable moments, without additional minimum separation assumptions needed by previous computationally efficient estimation procedures. Thus computational and information-theoretic barriers to efficient estimation in mixture models are precluded when the mixture components have means in general posit…
Casting neural networks in generative frameworks is a highly sought-after endeavor these days. Contemporary methods, such as Generative Adversarial Networks, capture some of the generative capabilities, but not all. In particular, they lack the ability of tractable marginalization, and thus are not suitable for many tasks. Other methods, based on arithmetic circuits and sum-product networks, do allow tractable marginalization, but their performance is challenged by the need to learn the structure of a circuit. Building on the tractability of arithmetic circuits, we leverage concepts from tenso…
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 …
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…
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…
Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a popular magnetic resonance imaging technique used to characterize microstructural changes in the brain. DTI studies quantify the diffusion of water molecules in a voxel using an estimated 3x3 symmetric positive definite diffusion tensor matrix. Statistical analysis of DTI data is challenging because the data are positive definite matrices. Matrix-variate information is often summarized by a univariate quantity, such as the fractional anisotropy (FA), leading to a loss of information. Furthermore, DTI analyses often ignore the spatial association of neighbori…
Choose A Table: Tensor Dirichlet Process Multinomial Mixture Model with Graphs for Passenger Trajectory Clustering
University of Cologne（科隆大学）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；HKUST-GZ（香港科技大学（广州））
Tensor Dirichlet Process Multinomial Mixture Model for Passenger Trajectory Clustering
University of Cologne（科隆大学）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；HKUST (Guangzhou Campus)（香港科技大学（广州校区））
University of California, Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）；Microsoft Research, New England（微软研究院新英格兰分院）
We provide guarantees for learning latent variable models emphasizing on the overcomplete regime, where the dimensionality of the latent space can exceed the observed dimensionality. In particular, we consider multiview mixtures, spherical Gaussian mixtures, ICA, and sparse coding models. We provide tight concentration bounds for empirical moments through novel covering arguments. We analyze parameter recovery through a simple tensor power update algorithm. In the semi-supervised setting, we exploit the label or prior information to get a rough estimate of the model parameters, and then refine…
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…
University of California, Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）；Duke University（杜克大学）
We present a novel analysis of the dynamics of tensor power iterations in the overcomplete regime where the tensor CP rank is larger than the input dimension. Finding the CP decomposition of an overcomplete tensor is NP-hard in general. We consider the case where the tensor components are randomly drawn, and show that the simple power iteration recovers the components with bounded error under mild initialization conditions. We apply our analysis to unsupervised learning of latent variable models, such as multi-view mixture models and spherical Gaussian mixtures. Given the third order moment te…
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学大卫·R·切里顿计算机科学学院）
The Gaussian mixture model is a classic technique for clustering and data modeling that is used in numerous applications. With the rise of big data, there is a need for parameter estimation techniques that can handle streaming data and distribute the computation over several processors. While online variants of the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm exist, their data efficiency is reduced by a stochastic approximation of the E-step and it is not clear how to distribute the computation over multiple processors. We propose a Bayesian learning technique that lends itself naturally to online …
We derive an asymptotic expansion for the log likelihood of Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) with equal covariance matrices in the low signal-to-noise regime. The expansion reveals an intimate connection between two types of algorithms for parameter estimation: the method of moments and likelihood optimizing algorithms such as Expectation-Maximization (EM). We show that likelihood optimization in the low SNR regime reduces to a sequence of least squares optimization problems that match the moments of the estimate to the ground truth moments one by one. This connection is a stepping stone toward …
We exploit a suitable moment-based characterization of the mixture of Poisson distribution for developing Bayesian inference for the unknown size of a finite population whose units are subject to multiple occurrences during an enumeration sampling stage. This is a particularly challenging setting for which many other attempts have been made for inferring the unknown characteristics of the population. Here we put particular emphasis on the construction of a default prior elicitation of the characteristics of the mixing distribution. We assess the comparative performance of our approach in real …
We propose a structure of a semiparametric two-component mixture model when one component is parametric and the other is defined through L-moments conditions. Estimation of a two-component mixture model with an unknown component is very difficult when no particular assumption is made on the structure of the unknown component. A previous work was proposed to incorporate a prior linear information concerning the distribution function of the unknown component such as moment constraints. We propose here to incorporate a prior linear information about the quantile function of the unknown component …
In data processing and machine learning, an important challenge is to recover and exploit models that can represent accurately the data. We consider the problem of recovering Gaussian mixture models from datasets. We investigate symmetric tensor decomposition methods for tackling this problem, where the tensor is built from empirical moments of the data distribution. We consider identifiable tensors, which have a unique decomposition, showing that moment tensors built from spherical Gaussian mixtures have this property. We prove that symmetric tensors with interpolation degree strictly less th…
We consider the problem of learning mixtures of generalized linear models (GLM) which arise in classification and regression problems. Typical learning approaches such as expectation maximization (EM) or variational Bayes can get stuck in spurious local optima. In contrast, we present a tensor decomposition method which is guaranteed to correctly recover the parameters. The key insight is to employ certain feature transformations of the input, which depend on the input generative model. Specifically, we employ score function tensors of the input and compute their cross-correlation with the res…
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey（罗格斯大学新泽西州立大学）；Electronic Arts（美国艺电）
This work addresses the problem of learning sparse representations of tensor data using structured dictionary learning. It proposes learning a mixture of separable dictionaries to better capture the structure of tensor data by generalizing the separable dictionary learning model. Two different approaches for learning mixture of separable dictionaries are explored and sufficient conditions for local identifiability of the underlying dictionary are derived in each case. Moreover, computational algorithms are developed to solve the problem of learning mixture of separable dictionaries in both bat…
We give an algorithm for completing an order-$m$ symmetric low-rank tensor from its multilinear entries in time roughly proportional to the number of tensor entries. We apply our tensor completion algorithm to the problem of learning mixtures of product distributions over the hypercube, obtaining new algorithmic results. If the centers of the product distribution are linearly independent, then we recover distributions with as many as $Ω(n)$ centers in polynomial time and sample complexity. In the general case, we recover distributions with as many as $\tildeΩ(n)$ centers in quasi-polynomial ti…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
We study the problem of community detection in multi-layer networks, where pairs of nodes can be related in multiple modalities. We introduce a general framework, i.e., mixture multi-layer stochastic block model (MMSBM), which includes many earlier models as special cases. We propose a tensor-based algorithm (TWIST) to reveal both global/local memberships of nodes, and memberships of layers. We show that the TWIST procedure can accurately detect the communities with small misclassification error as the number of nodes and/or the number of layers increases. Numerical studies confirm our theoret…
Microsoft Research India（微软研究院印度）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
We study the problem of learning a distribution from samples, when the underlying distribution is a mixture of product distributions over discrete domains. This problem is motivated by several practical applications such as crowd-sourcing, recommendation systems, and learning Boolean functions. The existing solutions either heavily rely on the fact that the number of components in the mixtures is finite or have sample/time complexity that is exponential in the number of components. In this paper, we introduce a polynomial time/sample complexity method for learning a mixture of $r$ discrete pro…
We consider the problem of solving mixed random linear equations with $k$ components. This is the noiseless setting of mixed linear regression. The goal is to estimate multiple linear models from mixed samples in the case where the labels (which sample corresponds to which model) are not observed. We give a tractable algorithm for the mixed linear equation problem, and show that under some technical conditions, our algorithm is guaranteed to solve the problem exactly with sample complexity linear in the dimension, and polynomial in $k$, the number of components. Previous approaches have requir…
Learning Mixtures of Linear Dynamical Systems via Hybrid Tensor-EM Method
Department of Biomedical Engineering（生物医学工程系）；Wu Tsai Institute, Center for Neurocomputation and Machine Intelligence（吴泰教授研究所、神经计算与人工智能中心）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）
In this work, we study non-parametric estimation of joint probabilities of a given set of discrete and continuous random variables from their (empirically estimated) 2D marginals, under the assumption that the joint probability could be decomposed and approximated by a mixture of product densities/mass functions. The problem of estimating the joint probability density function (PDF) using semi-parametric techniques such as Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) is widely studied. However such techniques yield poor results when the underlying densities are mixtures of various other families of distribu…
We propose a probabilistic modeling framework for learning the dynamic patterns in the collective behaviors of social agents and developing profiles for different behavioral groups, using data collected from multiple information sources. The proposed model is based on a hierarchical Bayesian process, in which each observation is a finite mixture of an set of latent groups and the mixture proportions (i.e., group probabilities) are drawn randomly. Each group is associated with some distributions over a finite set of outcomes. Moreover, as time evolves, the structure of these groups also changes…
Density estimation via mixture discrepancy and moments
School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China（北京大学数学科学学院）；School of Mathematical Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China（北京师范大学数学科学学院）
