In finite mixtures of location-scale distributions, if there is no constraint on the parameters then the maximum likelihood estimate does not exist. But when the ratios of the scale parameters are restricted appropriately, the maximum likelihood estimate exists. We prove that the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is strongly consistent, if the ratios of the scale parameters are restricted from below by $\exp(-n^{d}), 0 < d < 1 $, where $n$ is the sample size.
The large-sample properties of likelihood-based statistical inference under mixture models have received much attention from statisticians. Although the consistency of the nonparametric MLE is regarded as a standard conclusion, many researchers ignore the precise conditions required on the mixture model. An incorrect claim of consistency can lead to false conclusions even if the mixture model under investigation seems well behaved. Under a finite normal mixture model, for instance, the consistency of the plain MLE is often erroneously assumed in spite of recent research breakthroughs. This pap…
We consider maximum likelihood estimation of finite mixture of uniform distributions. We prove that maximum likelihood estimator is strongly consistent, if the scale parameters of the component uniform distributions are restricted from below by exp(-n^d), 0 < d < 1, where n is the sample size.
In a finite mixture of location-scale distributions maximum likelihood estimator does not exist because of the unboundedness of the likelihood function when the scale parameter of some mixture component approaches zero. In order to study the strong consistency of maximum likelihood estimator, we consider the case that the scale parameters of the component distributions are restricted from below by $c_n$, where $c_n$ is a sequence of positive real numbers which tend to zero as the sample size $n$ increases. We prove that under mild regularity conditions maximum likelihood estimator is strongly …
Suppose that $\m{U} = (U_1, \ldots , U_d) $ has a Uniform$([0,1]^d)$ distribution, that $\m{Y} = (Y_1 , \ldots , Y_d) $ has the distribution $G$ on $\RR_+^d$, and let $\m{X} = (X_1 , \ldots , X_d) = (U_1 Y_1 , \ldots , U_d Y_d )$. The resulting class of distributions of $\m{X}$ (as $G$ varies over all distributions on $\RR_+^d$) is called the {\sl Scale Mixture of Uniforms} class of distributions, and the corresponding class of densities on $\RR_+^d$ is denoted by $\{\cal F}_{SMU}(d)$. We study maximum likelihood estimation in the family ${\cal F}_{SMU}(d)$. We prove existence of the MLE, esta…
Department of Statistics, University of Washington（华盛顿大学统计系）；Department of Statistics, University of Chicago（芝加哥大学统计系）
The Gaussian-smoothed optimal transport (GOT) framework, pioneered in Goldfeld et al. (2020) and followed up by a series of subsequent papers, has quickly caught attention among researchers in statistics, machine learning, information theory, and related fields. One key observation made therein is that, by adapting to the GOT framework instead of its unsmoothed counterpart, the curse of dimensionality for using the empirical measure to approximate the true data generating distribution can be lifted. The current paper shows that a related observation applies to the estimation of nonparametric m…
Finite state space hidden Markov models are flexible tools to model phenomena with complex time dependencies: any process distribution can be approximated by a hidden Markov model with enough hidden states.We consider the problem of estimating an unknown process distribution using nonparametric hidden Markov models in the misspecified setting, that is when the data-generating process may not be a hidden Markov model.We show that when the true distribution is exponentially mixing and satisfies a forgetting assumption, the maximum likelihood estimator recovers the best approximation of the true …
We revisit the classical problem of deriving convergence rates for the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) in finite mixture models. The Wasserstein distance has become a standard loss function for the analysis of parameter estimation in these models, due in part to its ability to circumvent label switching and to accurately characterize the behaviour of fitted mixture components with vanishing weights. However, the Wasserstein distance is only able to capture the worst-case convergence rate among the remaining fitted mixture components. We demonstrate that when the log-likelihood function is p…
Determinantal point processes (DPPs) have wide-ranging applications in machine learning, where they are used to enforce the notion of diversity in subset selection problems. Many estimators have been proposed, but surprisingly the basic properties of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) have received little attention. In this paper, we study the local geometry of the expected log-likelihood function to prove several rates of convergence for the MLE. We also give a complete characterization of the case where the MLE converges at a parametric rate. Even in the latter case, we also exhibit a po…
University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；University of Caen（卡昂大学）；La Trobe University（拉筹伯大学）
Mixtures-of-Experts models and their maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) via the EM algorithm have been thoroughly studied in the statistics and machine learning literature. They are subject of a growing investigation in the context of modeling with high-dimensional predictors with regularized MLE. We examine MoE with Gaussian gating network, for clustering and regression, and propose an $\ell_1$-regularized MLE to encourage sparse models and deal with the high-dimensional setting. We develop an EM-Lasso algorithm to perform parameter estimation and utilize a BIC-like criterion to select the m…
In this article, we revisit the problem of estimating the unknown zero-symmetric distribution in a two-component location mixture model, considered in previous works, now under the assumption that the zero-symmetric distribution has a log-concave density. When consistent estimators for the shift locations and mixing probability are used, we show that the nonparametric log-concave Maximum Likelihood estimator (MLE) of both the mixed density and that of the unknown zero-symmetric component are consistent in the Hellinger distance. In case the estimators for the shift locations and mixing probabi…
Determinantal point processes (DPPs) have wide-ranging applications in machine learning, where they are used to enforce the notion of diversity in subset selection problems. Many estimators have been proposed, but surprisingly the basic properties of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) have received little attention. The difficulty is that it is a non-concave maximization problem, and such functions are notoriously difficult to understand in high dimensions, despite their importance in modern machine learning. Here we study both the local and global geometry of the expected log-likelihood f…
This paper studies the estimation of high-dimensional, discrete, possibly sparse, mixture models in topic models. The data consists of observed multinomial counts of $p$ words across $n$ independent documents. In topic models, the $p\times n$ expected word frequency matrix is assumed to be factorized as a $p\times K$ word-topic matrix $A$ and a $K\times n$ topic-document matrix $T$. Since columns of both matrices represent conditional probabilities belonging to probability simplices, columns of $A$ are viewed as $p$-dimensional mixture components that are common to all documents while columns …
The problem of estimation of the distribution parameters on the sample when the part of these parameters are discrete (e.g. integer) is considered. We prove that the rate of convergence of MLE estimates under the natural conditions on the distribution density is exponentially fast.
This work studies the properties of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of a non-linear model with Gaussian errors and multidimensional parameter. The observations are collected in a two-stage experimental design and are dependent since the second stage design is determined by the observations at the first stage; the MLE maximizes the total likelihood. Differently from the most of the literature, the first stage sample size is small, and hence asymptotic approximation is used only in the second stage. It is proved that the MLE is consistent and that its asymptotic distribution is a specific…
Demystifying Softmax Gating Function in Gaussian Mixture of Experts
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Univ. Grenoble Alpes, Inria（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学，法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；CNRS, Grenoble INP, LJK（法国国家科学研究中心，格勒诺布尔理工学院，让·库尔研究所）
University of Texas（德克萨斯大学）；University of California（加利福尼亚大学）
We provide a theoretical treatment of over-specified Gaussian mixtures of experts with covariate-free gating networks. We establish the convergence rates of the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) for these models. Our proof technique is based on a novel notion of \emph{algebraic independence} of the expert functions. Drawing on optimal transport theory, we establish a connection between the algebraic independence and a certain class of partial differential equations (PDEs). Exploiting this connection allows us to derive convergence rates and minimax lower bounds for parameter estimation.
This manuscript investigates unconditional and conditional-on-stopping maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs), information measures and information loss associated with conditioning in group sequential designs (GSDs). The possibility of early stopping brings truncation to the distributional form of MLEs; sequentially, GSD decisions eliminate some events from the sample space. Multiple testing induces mixtures on the adapted sample space. Distributions of MLEs are mixtures of truncated distributions. Test statistics that are asymptotically normal without GSD, have asymptotic distributions, under …
In fitting a mixture of linear regression models, normal assumption is traditionally used to model the error and then regression parameters are estimated by the maximum likelihood estimators (MLE). This procedure is not valid if the normal assumption is violated. To relax the normal assumption on the error distribution hence reduce the modeling bias, we propose semiparametric mixture of linear regression models with unspecified error distributions. We establish a more general identifiability result under weaker conditions than existing results, construct a class of new estimators, and establis…
In the context of Independent Component Analysis (ICA), noisy mixtures pose a dilemma regarding the desired objective. On one hand, a "maximally separating" solution, providing the minimal attainable Interference-to-Source-Ratio (ISR), would often suffer from significant residual noise. On the other hand, optimal Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) estimation would yield estimates which are the "closest possible" to the true sources, often at the cost of compromised ISR. In this work, we consider noisy mixtures of temporally-diverse stationary Gaussian sources in a semi-blind scenario, which conv…
Random Utility Models (RUMs), which subsume Plackett-Luce model (PL) as a special case, are among the most popular models for preference learning. In this paper, we consider RUMs with features and their mixtures, where each alternative has a vector of features, possibly different across agents. Such models significantly generalize the standard PL and RUMs, but are not as well investigated in the literature. We extend mixtures of RUMs with features to models that generate incomplete preferences and characterize their identifiability. For PL, we prove that when PL with features is identifiable, …
Anomaly estimation, or the problem of finding a subset of a dataset that differs from the rest of the dataset, is a classic problem in machine learning and data mining. In both theoretical work and in applications, the anomaly is assumed to have a specific structure defined by membership in an $\textit{anomaly family}$. For example, in temporal data the anomaly family may be time intervals, while in network data the anomaly family may be connected subgraphs. The most prominent approach for anomaly estimation is to compute the Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE) of the anomaly; however, it was r…
The finite Gamma mixture model is often used to describe randomness in income data, insurance data, and data from other applications. The popular likelihood approach, however, does not work for this model because the likelihood function is unbounded, and the maximum likelihood estimator is therefore not well defined. There has been much research into ways to ensure the consistent estimation of the mixing distribution, including placing an upper bound on the shape parameter or adding a penalty to the log-likelihood function. In this paper, we show that if the shape parameter in the finite Gamma…
We introduce and show the existence of a Hawkes self-exciting point process with exponentially-decreasing kernel and where parameters are time-varying. The quantity of interest is defined as the integrated parameter $T^{-1}\int_0^Tθ_t^*dt$, where $θ_t^*$ is the time-varying parameter, and we consider the high-frequency asymptotics. To estimate it naïvely, we chop the data into several blocks, compute the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) on each block, and take the average of the local estimates. The asymptotic bias explodes asymptotically, thus we provide a non-naïve estimator which is const…
Introduced by Kiefer and Wolfowitz \cite{KW56}, the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) is a widely used methodology for learning mixture odels and empirical Bayes estimation. Sidestepping the non-convexity in mixture likelihood, the NPMLE estimates the mixing distribution by maximizing the total likelihood over the space of probability measures, which can be viewed as an extreme form of overparameterization. In this paper we discover a surprising property of the NPMLE solution. Consider, for example, a Gaussian mixture model on the real line with a subgaussian mixing distributi…
We employ a parameter-free distribution estimation framework where estimators are random distributions and utilize the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence as a loss function. Wu and Vos [J. Statist. Plann. Inference 142 (2012) 1525-1536] show that when an estimator obtained from an i.i.d. sample is viewed as a random distribution, the KL risk of the estimator decomposes in a fashion parallel to the mean squared error decomposition when the estimator is a real-valued random variable. In this paper, we explore how conditional versions of distribution expectation ($E^{\dagger}$) can be defined so th…
We develop a mixtures-of-experts (ME) approach to the multiclass classification where the predictors are univariate functions. It consists of a ME model in which both the gating network and the experts network are constructed upon multinomial logistic activation functions with functional inputs. We perform a regularized maximum likelihood estimation in which the coefficient functions enjoy interpretable sparsity constraints on targeted derivatives. We develop an EM-Lasso like algorithm to compute the regularized MLE and evaluate the proposed approach on simulated and real data.
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Consider a setting with $N$ independent individuals, each with an unknown parameter, $p_i \in [0, 1]$ drawn from some unknown distribution $P^\star$. After observing the outcomes of $t$ independent Bernoulli trials, i.e., $X_i \sim \text{Binomial}(t, p_i)$ per individual, our objective is to accurately estimate $P^\star$. This problem arises in numerous domains, including the social sciences, psychology, health-care, and biology, where the size of the population under study is usually large while the number of observations per individual is often limited. Our main result shows that, in the reg…
In this article, a new natural discrete analog of the one parameter polynomial exponential(OPPE) distribution as a mixture of a number of negative binomial distributions has been proposed and is called as a natural discrete one parameter polynomial exponential (NDOPPE) distribution. This distribution is a generalized version of natural discrete Lindley (NDL) distribution, proposed and studied by Ahmed and Afify (2019). Two estimators viz., MLE and UMVUE of the PMF and the CDF of a NDOPPE distribution have been derived. The estimators have been compared with respect to their MSEs. Simulation st…
In mixtures-of-experts (ME) model, where a number of submodels (experts) are combined, there have been two longstanding problems: (i) how many experts should be chosen, given the size of the training data? (ii) given the total number of parameters, is it better to use a few very complex experts, or is it better to combine many simple experts? In this paper, we try to provide some insights to these problems through a theoretic study on a ME structure where $m$ experts are mixed, with each expert being related to a polynomial regression model of order $k$. We study the convergence rate of the ma…
Language models are generally trained on data spanning a wide range of topics (e.g., news, reviews, fiction), but they might be applied to an a priori unknown target distribution (e.g., restaurant reviews). In this paper, we first show that training on text outside the test distribution can degrade test performance when using standard maximum likelihood (MLE) training. To remedy this without the knowledge of the test distribution, we propose an approach which trains a model that performs well over a wide range of potential test distributions. In particular, we derive a new distributionally rob…
Towards Convergence Rates for Parameter Estimation in Gaussian-gated Mixture of Experts
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；Univ. Grenoble Alpes（格勒诺布尔大学）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Grenoble INP（格勒诺布尔理工学院）；LJK（让·昆廷诺实验室）
This paper develops a new class of conditional Markov jump processes with regime switching and paths dependence. The key novel feature of the developed process lies on its ability to switch the transition rate as it moves from one state to another with switching probability depending on the current state and time of the process as well as its past trajectories. As such, the transition from current state to another depends on the holding time of the process in the state. Distributional properties of the process are given explicitly in terms of the speed regimes represented by a finite number of…
We advocate for a practical Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) approach towards designing loss functions for regression and forecasting, as an alternative to the typical approach of direct empirical risk minimization on a specific target metric. The MLE approach is better suited to capture inductive biases such as prior domain knowledge in datasets, and can output post-hoc estimators at inference time that can optimize different types of target metrics. We present theoretical results to demonstrate that our approach is competitive with any estimator for the target metric under some general co…
Neural autoregressive sequence models are used to generate sequences in a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, where they are evaluated according to sequence-level task losses. These models are typically trained with maximum likelihood estimation, which ignores the task loss, yet empirically performs well as a surrogate objective. Typical approaches to directly optimizing the task loss such as policy gradient and minimum risk training are based around sampling in the sequence space to obtain candidate update directions that are scored based on the loss of a single sequence. In t…
This article aims to introduced a new lifetime distribution named as exponentiated xgamma distribution (EXGD). The new generalization obtained from xgamma distribution, a special finite mixture of exponential and gamma distributions. The proposed model is very flexible and positively skewed. Different statistical properties of the proposed model, viz., reliability characteristics, moments, generating function, mean deviation, quantile function, conditional moments, order statistics, reliability curves and indices and random variate generation etc. have been derived. The estimation of the of th…
Dendrograms of Mixing Measures for Softmax-Gated Gaussian Mixture of Experts: Consistency Without Model Sweeps
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Science, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam（越南胡志明市科学大学数学与计算机科学学院）；Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam（越南胡志明市国家大学）；Faculty of Information Technology, University of Science, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam（越南胡志明市科学大学信息技术学院）；ARC Centre of Excellence for the Mathematical Analysis of Cellular Systems（细胞系统数学分析 excellence 中心）；School of Mathematical Sciences, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane City, Australia（昆士兰科技大学数学科学学院）；Department of Statistics and Data Science, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校统计与数据科学系）
In this paper, different strands of literature are combined in order to obtain algorithms for semi-parametric estimation of discrete choice models that include the modelling of unobserved heterogeneity by using mixing distributions for the parameters defining the preferences. The models use the theory on non-parametric maximum likelihood estimation (NP-MLE) that has been developed for general mixing models. The expectation-maximization (EM) techniques used in the NP-MLE literature are combined with strategies for choosing appropriate approximating models using adaptive grid techniques. \\ Join…
In many signal detection and classification problems, we have knowledge of the distribution under each hypothesis, but not the prior probabilities. This paper is aimed at providing theory to quantify the performance of detection via estimating prior probabilities from either labeled or unlabeled training data. The error or {\em risk} is considered as a function of the prior probabilities. We show that the risk function is locally Lipschitz in the vicinity of the true prior probabilities, and the error of detectors based on estimated prior probabilities depends on the behavior of the risk funct…
A Hybrid censoring scheme is mixture of Type-I and Type-II censoring schemes. Based on hybrid censored samples, this paper deals with the in- ference on R = P(X > Y ), when X and Y are two independent Weibull distributions with different scale parameters, but having the same shape pa- rameter. The maximum likelihood estimator (MLE), and the approximate MLE (AMLE) of R are obtained. The asymptotic distribution of the maxi- mum likelihood estimator of R is obtained. Based on the asymptotic distribu- tion, the confidence interval of R can be derived. Two bootstrap confidence intervals are also pr…
A new family of distribution is proposed by using Kumaraswamy-G (Cordeiro and de Castro, 2011) distribution as the base line distribution in the Generalized Marshal-Olkin (Jayakumar and Mathew, 2008) Construction. A number of special cases are presented. By expanding the probability density function and the survival function as infinite series the proposed family is seen as infinite mixtures of the Kumaraswamy-G (Cordeiro and de Castro, 2011) distribution. Density function and its series expansions for order statistics are also obtained. Order statistics, moments, moment generating function, R…
Mixture of Experts (MoE) are successful models for modeling heterogeneous data in many statistical learning problems including regression, clustering and classification. Generally fitted by maximum likelihood estimation via the well-known EM algorithm, their application to high-dimensional problems is still therefore challenging. We consider the problem of fitting and feature selection in MoE models, and propose a regularized maximum likelihood estimation approach that encourages sparse solutions for heterogeneous regression data models with potentially high-dimensional predictors. Unlike stat…
This paper proposes an efficient numerical integration formula to compute the normalizing constant of Fisher--Bingham distributions. This formula uses a numerical integration formula with the continuous Euler transform to a Fourier-type integral representation of the normalizing constant. As this method is fast and accurate, it can be applied to the calculation of the normalizing constant of high-dimensional Fisher--Bingham distributions. More precisely, the error decays exponentially with an increase in the integration points, and the computation cost increases linearly with the dimensions. I…
In this paper, we introduce a variant of hidden Markov models in which the transition probabilities between the states, as well as the emission distributions, are not constant in time but vary in a periodic manner. This class of models, that we will call seasonal hidden Markov models (SHMM) is particularly useful in practice, as many applications involve a seasonal behaviour. However, up to now, there is no theoretical result regarding this kind of model. We show that under mild assumptions, SHMM are identifiable: we can identify the transition matrices and the emission distributions from the …
To interpret differentially expressed genes or other discovered features, researchers conduct hypothesis tests to determine which biological categories such as those of the Gene Ontology (GO) are enriched in the sense of having differential representation among the discovered features. We study application of better estimators of the local false discovery rate (LFDR), a probability that the biological category has equivalent representation among the preselected features. We identified three promising estimators of the LFDR for detecting differential representation: a semiparametric estimator (…
The robust improper maximum likelihood estimator (RIMLE) is a new method for robust multivariate clustering finding approximately Gaussian clusters. It maximizes a pseudo-likelihood defined by adding a component with improper constant density for accommodating outliers to a Gaussian mixture. A special case of the RIMLE is MLE for multivariate finite Gaussian mixture models. In this paper we treat existence, consistency, and breakdown theory for the RIMLE comprehensively. RIMLE's existence is proved under non-smooth covariance matrix constraints. It is shown that these can be implemented via a …
