1,474 research outputs found
Estimating Mixture Entropy with Pairwise Distances
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
-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.Comment: Corrects several errata in published version, in particular in
Section V (bounds on mutual information
Sliced Wasserstein Distance for Learning Gaussian Mixture Models
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, which
gives rise to a new algorithm. Specifically, we propose minimizing the
sliced-Wasserstein distance between the mixture model and the data distribution
with respect to the GMM parameters. In contrast to the KL-divergence, the
energy landscape for the sliced-Wasserstein distance is more well-behaved and
therefore more suitable for a stochastic gradient descent scheme to obtain the
optimal GMM parameters. We show that our formulation results in parameter
estimates that are more robust to random initializations and demonstrate that
it can estimate high-dimensional data distributions more faithfully than the EM
algorithm
Guaranteed bounds on the Kullback-Leibler divergence of univariate mixtures using piecewise log-sum-exp inequalities
Information-theoretic measures such as the entropy, cross-entropy and the
Kullback-Leibler divergence between two mixture models is a core primitive in
many signal processing tasks. Since the Kullback-Leibler divergence of mixtures
provably does not admit a closed-form formula, it is in practice either
estimated using costly Monte-Carlo stochastic integration, approximated, or
bounded using various techniques. We present a fast and generic method that
builds algorithmically closed-form lower and upper bounds on the entropy, the
cross-entropy and the Kullback-Leibler divergence of mixtures. We illustrate
the versatile method by reporting on our experiments for approximating the
Kullback-Leibler divergence between univariate exponential mixtures, Gaussian
mixtures, Rayleigh mixtures, and Gamma mixtures.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figure
Measuring semantic similarity between concepts in visual domain
Author name used in this publication: Dagan FengRefereed conference paper2008-2009 > Academic research: refereed > Refereed conference paperVersion of RecordPublishe
Image Segmentation Using Active Contours Driven by the Bhattacharyya Gradient Flow
©2007 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or distribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.DOI: 10.1109/TIP.2007.908073This paper addresses the problem of image segmentation by means of active contours, whose evolution is driven by the gradient flow derived froman energy functional that is based on the Bhattacharyya distance. In particular, given the values of a photometric variable (or of a set thereof), which is to be used for classifying the image pixels, the active contours are designed to converge to the shape that results in maximal discrepancy between the empirical distributions of the photometric variable inside and outside of the contours. The above discrepancy is measured by means of the Bhattacharyya distance that proves to be an extremely useful tool for solving the problem at hand. The proposed methodology can be viewed as a generalization of the segmentation methods, in which active contours maximize the difference between a finite number of empirical moments of the "inside" and "outside" distributions. Furthermore, it is shown that the proposed methodology is very versatile and flexible in the sense that it allows one to easily accommodate a diversity of the image features based on which the segmentation should be performed. As an additional contribution, a method for automatically adjusting the smoothness properties of the empirical distributions is proposed. Such a procedure is crucial in situations when the number of data samples (supporting a certain segmentation class) varies considerably in the course of the evolution of the active contour. In this case, the smoothness properties of the empirical distributions have to be properly adjusted to avoid either over- or underestimation artifacts. Finally, a number of relevant segmentation results are demonstrated and some further research directions are discussed
- …