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In this contribution, we propose a generic online (also sometimes called adaptive or recursive) version of the Expectation-Maximisation (EM) algorithm applicable to latent variable models of independent observations. Compared to the algorithm of Titterington (1984), this approach is more directly connected to the usual EM algorithm and does not rely on integration with respect to the complete data distribution. The resulting algorithm is usually simpler and is shown to achieve convergence to the stationary points of the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the marginal distribution of the observation and the model distribution at the optimal rate, i.e., that of the maximum likelihood estimator. In addition, the proposed approach is also suitable for conditional (or regression) models, as illustrated in the case of the mixture of linear regressions model.
A novel approach to perform unsupervised sequential learning for functional data is proposed. Our goal is to extract reference shapes (referred to as templates) from noisy, deformed and censored realizations of curves and images. Our model generalizes the Bayesian dense deformable template model (Allassonni`ere et al., 2007), a hierarchical model in which the template is the function to be estimated and the deformation is a nuisance, assumed to be random with a known prior distribution. The templates are estimated using a Monte Carlo version of the online Expectation-Maximization algorithm, extending the work from Cappe and Moulines (2009). Our sequential inference framework is significantly more computationally efficient than equivalent batch learning algorithms, especially when the missing data is high-dimensional. Some numerical illustrations on curve registration problem and templates extraction from images are provided to support our findings.
In this paper we introduce a new sampling algorithm which has the potential to be adopted as a universal replacement to the Metropolis--Hastings algorithm. It is related to the slice sampler, and motivated by an algorithm which is applicable to discrete probability distributions %which can be viewed as an alternative to the Metropolis--Hastings algorithm in this setting, which obviates the need for a proposal distribution, in that is has no accept/reject component. This paper looks at the continuous counterpart. A latent variable combined with a slice sampler and a shrinkage procedure applied to uniform density functions creates a highly efficient sampler which can generate random variables from very high dimensional distributions as a single block.
In this paper, we develop a new estimation procedure based on the non-linear conjugate gradient (NCG) algorithm for the Box-Cox transformation cure rate model. We compare the performance of the NCG algorithm with the well-known expectation maximization (EM) algorithm through a simulation study and show the advantages of the NCG algorithm over the EM algorithm. In particular, we show that the NCG algorithm allows simultaneous maximization of all model parameters when the likelihood surface is flat with respect to a Box-Cox model parameter. This is a big advantage over the EM algorithm, where a profile likelihood approach has been proposed in the literature that may not provide satisfactory results. We finally use the NCG algorithm to analyze a well-known melanoma data and show that it results in a better fit.
Latent position network models are a versatile tool in network science; applications include clustering entities, controlling for causal confounders, and defining priors over unobserved graphs. Estimating each nodes latent position is typically framed as a Bayesian inference problem, with Metropolis within Gibbs being the most popular tool for approximating the posterior distribution. However, it is well-known that Metropolis within Gibbs is inefficient for large networks; the acceptance ratios are expensive to compute, and the resultant posterior draws are highly correlated. In this article, we propose an alternative Markov chain Monte Carlo strategy---defined using a combination of split Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and Firefly Monte Carlo---that leverages the posterior distributions functional form for more efficient posterior computation. We demonstrate that these strategies outperform Metropolis within Gibbs and other algorithms on synthetic networks, as well as on real information-sharing networks of teachers and staff in a school district.
Conventional approaches of sampling signals follow the celebrated theorem of Nyquist and Shannon. Compressive sampling, introduced by Donoho, Romberg and Tao, is a new paradigm that goes against the conventional methods in data acquisition and provides a way of recovering signals using fewer samples than the traditional methods use. Here we suggest an alternative way of reconstructing the original signals in compressive sampling using EM algorithm. We first propose a naive approach which has certain computational difficulties and subsequently modify it to a new approach which performs better than the conventional methods of compressive sampling. The comparison of the different approaches and the performance of the new approach has been studied using simulated data.