57 research outputs found
Learning Mixtures of Distributions over Large Discrete Domains
We discuss recent results giving algorithms for learning mixtures of unstructured distributions
Efficient Sparse Clustering of High-Dimensional Non-spherical Gaussian Mixtures
We consider the problem of clustering data points in high dimensions, i.e.
when the number of data points may be much smaller than the number of
dimensions. Specifically, we consider a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) with
non-spherical Gaussian components, where the clusters are distinguished by only
a few relevant dimensions. The method we propose is a combination of a recent
approach for learning parameters of a Gaussian mixture model and sparse linear
discriminant analysis (LDA). In addition to cluster assignments, the method
returns an estimate of the set of features relevant for clustering. Our results
indicate that the sample complexity of clustering depends on the sparsity of
the relevant feature set, while only scaling logarithmically with the ambient
dimension. Additionally, we require much milder assumptions than existing work
on clustering in high dimensions. In particular, we do not require spherical
clusters nor necessitate mean separation along relevant dimensions.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figur
On Convergence of Epanechnikov Mean Shift
Epanechnikov Mean Shift is a simple yet empirically very effective algorithm
for clustering. It localizes the centroids of data clusters via estimating
modes of the probability distribution that generates the data points, using the
`optimal' Epanechnikov kernel density estimator. However, since the procedure
involves non-smooth kernel density functions, the convergence behavior of
Epanechnikov mean shift lacks theoretical support as of this writing---most of
the existing analyses are based on smooth functions and thus cannot be applied
to Epanechnikov Mean Shift. In this work, we first show that the original
Epanechnikov Mean Shift may indeed terminate at a non-critical point, due to
the non-smoothness nature. Based on our analysis, we propose a simple remedy to
fix it. The modified Epanechnikov Mean Shift is guaranteed to terminate at a
local maximum of the estimated density, which corresponds to a cluster
centroid, within a finite number of iterations. We also propose a way to avoid
running the Mean Shift iterates from every data point, while maintaining good
clustering accuracies under non-overlapping spherical Gaussian mixture models.
This further pushes Epanechnikov Mean Shift to handle very large and
high-dimensional data sets. Experiments show surprisingly good performance
compared to the Lloyd's K-means algorithm and the EM algorithm.Comment: AAAI 201
A Spectral Algorithm for Latent Dirichlet Allocation
Topic modeling is a generalization of clustering that posits that observations (words in a document) are generated by multiple latent factors (topics), as opposed to just one. The increased representational power comes at the cost of a more challenging unsupervised learning problem for estimating the topic-word distributions when only words are observed, and the topics are hidden.
This work provides a simple and efficient learning procedure that is guaranteed to recover the parameters for a wide class of topic models, including Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). For LDA, the procedure correctly recovers both the topic-word distributions and the parameters of the Dirichlet prior over the topic mixtures, using only trigram statistics (i.e., third order moments, which may be estimated with documents containing just three words). The method, called Excess Correlation Analysis, is based on a spectral decomposition of low-order moments via two singular value decompositions (SVDs). Moreover, the algorithm is scalable, since the SVDs are carried out only on k × k matrices, where k is the number of latent factors (topics) and is typically much smaller than the dimension of the observation (word) space
Multi-View Clustering via Canonical Correlation Analysis
Clustering data in high-dimensions is believed to be a hard problem in general. A number of efficient clustering algorithms developed in recent years address this problem by projecting the data into a lower-dimensional subspace, e.g. via Principal Components Analysis (PCA) or random projections, before clustering. Such techniques typically require stringent requirements on the separation between the cluster means (in order for the algorithm to be be successful).
Here, we show how using multiple views of the data can relax these stringent requirements. We use Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) to project the data in each view to a lower-dimensional subspace. Under the assumption that conditioned on the cluster label the views are uncorrelated, we show that the separation conditions required for the algorithm to be successful are rather mild (significantly weaker than those of prior results in the literature). We provide results for mixture of Gaussians, mixtures of log concave distributions, and mixtures of product distributions
How to Round Subspaces: A New Spectral Clustering Algorithm
A basic problem in spectral clustering is the following. If a solution
obtained from the spectral relaxation is close to an integral solution, is it
possible to find this integral solution even though they might be in completely
different basis? In this paper, we propose a new spectral clustering algorithm.
It can recover a -partition such that the subspace corresponding to the span
of its indicator vectors is close to the original subspace in
spectral norm with being the minimum possible ( always).
Moreover our algorithm does not impose any restriction on the cluster sizes.
Previously, no algorithm was known which could find a -partition closer than
.
We present two applications for our algorithm. First one finds a disjoint
union of bounded degree expanders which approximate a given graph in spectral
norm. The second one is for approximating the sparsest -partition in a graph
where each cluster have expansion at most provided where is the eigenvalue of
Laplacian matrix. This significantly improves upon the previous algorithms,
which required .Comment: Appeared in SODA 201
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