115 research outputs found
A data driven equivariant approach to constrained Gaussian mixture modeling
Maximum likelihood estimation of Gaussian mixture models with different
class-specific covariance matrices is known to be problematic. This is due to
the unboundedness of the likelihood, together with the presence of spurious
maximizers. Existing methods to bypass this obstacle are based on the fact that
unboundedness is avoided if the eigenvalues of the covariance matrices are
bounded away from zero. This can be done imposing some constraints on the
covariance matrices, i.e. by incorporating a priori information on the
covariance structure of the mixture components. The present work introduces a
constrained equivariant approach, where the class conditional covariance
matrices are shrunk towards a pre-specified matrix Psi. Data-driven choices of
the matrix Psi, when a priori information is not available, and the optimal
amount of shrinkage are investigated. The effectiveness of the proposal is
evaluated on the basis of a simulation study and an empirical example
Crossed simplicial groups and structured surfaces
We propose a generalization of the concept of a Ribbon graph suitable to
provide combinatorial models for marked surfaces equipped with a G-structure.
Our main insight is that the necessary combinatorics is neatly captured in the
concept of a crossed simplicial group as introduced, independently, by
Krasauskas and Fiedorowicz-Loday. In this context, Connes' cyclic category
leads to Ribbon graphs while other crossed simplicial groups naturally yield
different notions of structured graphs which model unoriented, N-spin, framed,
etc, surfaces. Our main result is that structured graphs provide orbicell
decompositions of the respective G-structured moduli spaces. As an application,
we show how, building on our theory of 2-Segal spaces, the resulting theory can
be used to construct categorified state sum invariants of G-structured
surfaces.Comment: 86 pages, v2: revised versio
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