174 research outputs found
-MLE: A fast algorithm for learning statistical mixture models
We describe -MLE, a fast and efficient local search algorithm for learning
finite statistical mixtures of exponential families such as Gaussian mixture
models. Mixture models are traditionally learned using the
expectation-maximization (EM) soft clustering technique that monotonically
increases the incomplete (expected complete) likelihood. Given prescribed
mixture weights, the hard clustering -MLE algorithm iteratively assigns data
to the most likely weighted component and update the component models using
Maximum Likelihood Estimators (MLEs). Using the duality between exponential
families and Bregman divergences, we prove that the local convergence of the
complete likelihood of -MLE follows directly from the convergence of a dual
additively weighted Bregman hard clustering. The inner loop of -MLE can be
implemented using any -means heuristic like the celebrated Lloyd's batched
or Hartigan's greedy swap updates. We then show how to update the mixture
weights by minimizing a cross-entropy criterion that implies to update weights
by taking the relative proportion of cluster points, and reiterate the mixture
parameter update and mixture weight update processes until convergence. Hard EM
is interpreted as a special case of -MLE when both the component update and
the weight update are performed successively in the inner loop. To initialize
-MLE, we propose -MLE++, a careful initialization of -MLE guaranteeing
probabilistically a global bound on the best possible complete likelihood.Comment: 31 pages, Extend preliminary paper presented at IEEE ICASSP 201
The Importance of Being Clustered: Uncluttering the Trends of Statistics from 1970 to 2015
In this paper we retrace the recent history of statistics by analyzing all
the papers published in five prestigious statistical journals since 1970,
namely: Annals of Statistics, Biometrika, Journal of the American Statistical
Association, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, series B and Statistical
Science. The aim is to construct a kind of "taxonomy" of the statistical papers
by organizing and by clustering them in main themes. In this sense being
identified in a cluster means being important enough to be uncluttered in the
vast and interconnected world of the statistical research. Since the main
statistical research topics naturally born, evolve or die during time, we will
also develop a dynamic clustering strategy, where a group in a time period is
allowed to migrate or to merge into different groups in the following one.
Results show that statistics is a very dynamic and evolving science, stimulated
by the rise of new research questions and types of data
Weakly-Supervised Neural Text Classification
Deep neural networks are gaining increasing popularity for the classic text
classification task, due to their strong expressive power and less requirement
for feature engineering. Despite such attractiveness, neural text
classification models suffer from the lack of training data in many real-world
applications. Although many semi-supervised and weakly-supervised text
classification models exist, they cannot be easily applied to deep neural
models and meanwhile support limited supervision types. In this paper, we
propose a weakly-supervised method that addresses the lack of training data in
neural text classification. Our method consists of two modules: (1) a
pseudo-document generator that leverages seed information to generate
pseudo-labeled documents for model pre-training, and (2) a self-training module
that bootstraps on real unlabeled data for model refinement. Our method has the
flexibility to handle different types of weak supervision and can be easily
integrated into existing deep neural models for text classification. We have
performed extensive experiments on three real-world datasets from different
domains. The results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves inspiring
performance without requiring excessive training data and outperforms baseline
methods significantly.Comment: CIKM 2018 Full Pape
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