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Register a new userPhase transitions and optimal algorithms in high-dimensional Gaussian mixture clustering
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We consider the problem of Gaussian mixture clustering in the high-dimensional limit where the data consists of $m$ points in $n$ dimensions, $n,m rightarrow infty$ and $alpha = m/n$ stays finite. Using exact but non-rigorous methods from statistical physics, we determine the critical value of $alpha$ and the distance between the clusters at which it becomes information-theoretically possible to reconstruct the membership into clusters better than chance. We also determine the accuracy achievable by the Bayes-optimal estimation algorithm. In particular, we find that when the number of clusters is sufficiently large, $r > 4 + 2 sqrt{alpha}$, there is a gap between the threshold for information-theoretically optimal performance and the threshold at which known algorithms succeed.
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We consider the phase retrieval problem of reconstructing a $n$-dimensional real or complex signal $mathbf{X}^{star}$ from $m$ (possibly noisy) observations $Y_mu = | sum_{i=1}^n Phi_{mu i} X^{star}_i/sqrt{n}|$, for a large class of correlated real and complex random sensing matrices $mathbf{Phi}$, in a high-dimensional setting where $m,ntoinfty$ while $alpha = m/n=Theta(1)$. First, we derive sharp asymptotics for the lowest possible estimation error achievable statistically and we unveil the existence of sharp phase transitions for the weak- and full-recovery thresholds as a function of the singular values of the matrix $mathbf{Phi}$. This is achieved by providing a rigorous proof of a result first obtained by the replica method from statistical mechanics. In particular, the information-theoretic transition to perfect recovery for full-rank matrices appears at $alpha=1$ (real case) and $alpha=2$ (complex case). Secondly, we analyze the performance of the best-known polynomial time algorithm for this problem -- approximate message-passing -- establishing the existence of a statistical-to-algorithmic gap depending, again, on the spectral properties of $mathbf{Phi}$. Our work provides an extensive classification of the statistical and algorithmic thresholds in high-dimensional phase retrieval for a broad class of random matrices.
We present a novel framework exploiting the cascade of phase transitions occurring during a simulated annealing of the Expectation-Maximisation algorithm to cluster datasets with multi-scale structures. Using the weighted local covariance, we can extract, a posteriori and without any prior knowledge, information on the number of clusters at different scales together with their size. We also study the linear stability of the iterative scheme to derive the threshold at which the first transition occurs and show how to approximate the next ones. Finally, we combine simulated annealing together with recent developments of regularised Gaussian mixture models to learn a principal graph from spatially structured datasets that can also exhibit many scales.
We analyze the connection between minimizers with good generalizing properties and high local entropy regions of a threshold-linear classifier in Gaussian mixtures with the mean squared error loss function. We show that there exist configurations that achieve the Bayes-optimal generalization error, even in the case of unbalanced clusters. We explore analytically the error-counting loss landscape in the vicinity of a Bayes-optimal solution, and show that the closer we get to such configurations, the higher the local entropy, implying that the Bayes-optimal solution lays inside a wide flat region. We also consider the algorithmically relevant case of targeting wide flat minima of the (differentiable) mean squared error loss. Our analytical and numerical results show not only that in the balanced case the dependence on the norm of the weights is mild, but also, in the unbalanced case, that the performances can be improved.
We study the problem of detecting a structured, low-rank signal matrix corrupted with additive Gaussian noise. This includes clustering in a Gaussian mixture model, sparse PCA, and submatrix localization. Each of these problems is conjectured to exhibit a sharp information-theoretic threshold, below which the signal is too weak for any algorithm to detect. We derive upper and lower bounds on these thresholds by applying the first and second moment methods to the likelihood ratio between these planted models and null models where the signal matrix is zero. Our bounds differ by at most a factor of root two when the rank is large (in the clustering and submatrix localization problems, when the number of clusters or blocks is large) or the signal matrix is very sparse. Moreover, our upper bounds show that for each of these problems there is a significant regime where reliable detection is information- theoretically possible but where known algorithms such as PCA fail completely, since the spectrum of the observed matrix is uninformative. This regime is analogous to the conjectured hard but detectable regime for community detection in sparse graphs.
Generalised linear models for multi-class classification problems are one of the fundamental building blocks of modern machine learning tasks. In this manuscript, we characterise the learning of a mixture of $K$ Gaussians with generic means and covariances via empirical risk minimisation (ERM) with any convex loss and regularisation. In particular, we prove exact asymptotics characterising the ERM estimator in high-dimensions, extending several previous results about Gaussian mixture classification in the literature. We exemplify our result in two tasks of interest in statistical learning: a) classification for a mixture with sparse means, where we study the efficiency of $ell_1$ penalty with respect to $ell_2$; b) max-margin multi-class classification, where we characterise the phase transition on the existence of the multi-class logistic maximum likelihood estimator for $K>2$. Finally, we discuss how our theory can be applied beyond the scope of synthetic data, showing that in different cases Gaussian mixtures capture closely the learning curve of classification tasks in real data sets.
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