5,839 research outputs found
On Learning Mixtures of Well-Separated Gaussians
We consider the problem of efficiently learning mixtures of a large number of
spherical Gaussians, when the components of the mixture are well separated. In
the most basic form of this problem, we are given samples from a uniform
mixture of standard spherical Gaussians, and the goal is to estimate the
means up to accuracy using samples.
In this work, we study the following question: what is the minimum separation
needed between the means for solving this task? The best known algorithm due to
Vempala and Wang [JCSS 2004] requires a separation of roughly
. On the other hand, Moitra and Valiant [FOCS 2010] showed
that with separation , exponentially many samples are required. We
address the significant gap between these two bounds, by showing the following
results.
1. We show that with separation , super-polynomially many
samples are required. In fact, this holds even when the means of the
Gaussians are picked at random in dimensions.
2. We show that with separation ,
samples suffice. Note that the bound on the separation is independent of
. This result is based on a new and efficient "accuracy boosting"
algorithm that takes as input coarse estimates of the true means and in time
outputs estimates of the means up to arbitrary accuracy
assuming the separation between the means is (independently of ).
We also present a computationally efficient algorithm in dimensions
with only separation. These results together essentially
characterize the optimal order of separation between components that is needed
to learn a mixture of spherical Gaussians with polynomial samples.Comment: Appeared in FOCS 2017. 55 pages, 1 figur
Learning Mixtures of Gaussians in High Dimensions
Efficiently learning mixture of Gaussians is a fundamental problem in
statistics and learning theory. Given samples coming from a random one out of k
Gaussian distributions in Rn, the learning problem asks to estimate the means
and the covariance matrices of these Gaussians. This learning problem arises in
many areas ranging from the natural sciences to the social sciences, and has
also found many machine learning applications. Unfortunately, learning mixture
of Gaussians is an information theoretically hard problem: in order to learn
the parameters up to a reasonable accuracy, the number of samples required is
exponential in the number of Gaussian components in the worst case. In this
work, we show that provided we are in high enough dimensions, the class of
Gaussian mixtures is learnable in its most general form under a smoothed
analysis framework, where the parameters are randomly perturbed from an
adversarial starting point. In particular, given samples from a mixture of
Gaussians with randomly perturbed parameters, when n > {\Omega}(k^2), we give
an algorithm that learns the parameters with polynomial running time and using
polynomial number of samples. The central algorithmic ideas consist of new ways
to decompose the moment tensor of the Gaussian mixture by exploiting its
structural properties. The symmetries of this tensor are derived from the
combinatorial structure of higher order moments of Gaussian distributions
(sometimes referred to as Isserlis' theorem or Wick's theorem). We also develop
new tools for bounding smallest singular values of structured random matrices,
which could be useful in other smoothed analysis settings
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