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Fast Incremental Expectation Maximization (FIEM) is a version of the EM framework for large datasets. In this paper, we first recast FIEM and other incremental EM type algorithms in the {em Stochastic Approximation within EM} framework. Then, we provide nonasymptotic bounds for the convergence in expectation as a function of the number of examples $n$ and of the maximal number of iterations $kmax$. We propose two strategies for achieving an $epsilon$-approximate stationary point, respectively with $kmax = O(n^{2/3}/epsilon)$ and $kmax = O(sqrt{n}/epsilon^{3/2})$, both strategies relying on a random termination rule before $kmax$ and on a constant step size in the Stochastic Approximation step. Our bounds provide some improvements on the literature. First, they allow $kmax$ to scale as $sqrt{n}$ which is better than $n^{2/3}$ which was the best rate obtained so far; it is at the cost of a larger dependence upon the tolerance $epsilon$, thus making this control relevant for small to medium accuracy with respect to the number of examples $n$. Second, for the $n^{2/3}$-rate, the numerical illustrations show that thanks to an optimized choice of the step size and of the bounds in terms of quantities characterizing the optimization problem at hand, our results desig a less conservative choice of the step size and provide a better control of the convergence in expectation.
The EM algorithm is one of the most popular algorithm for inference in latent data models. The original formulation of the EM algorithm does not scale to large data set, because the whole data set is required at each iteration of the algorithm. To alleviate this problem, Neal and Hinton have proposed an incremental version of the EM (iEM) in which at each iteration the conditional expectation of the latent data (E-step) is updated only for a mini-batch of observations. Another approach has been proposed by Cappe and Moulines in which the E-step is replaced by a stochastic approximation step, closely related to stochastic gradient. In this paper, we analyze incremental and stochastic version of the EM algorithm as well as the variance reduced-version of Chen et. al. in a common unifying framework. We also introduce a new version incremental version, inspired by the SAGA algorithm by Defazio et. al. We establish non-asymptotic convergence bounds for global convergence. Numerical applications are presented in this article to illustrate our findings.
The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is a key reference for inference in latent variable models; unfortunately, its computational cost is prohibitive in the large scale learning setting. In this paper, we propose an extension of the Stochastic Path-Integrated Differential EstimatoR EM (SPIDER-EM) and derive complexity bounds for this novel algorithm, designed to solve smooth nonconvex finite-sum optimization problems. We show that it reaches the same state of the art complexity bounds as SPIDER-EM; and provide conditions for a linear rate of convergence. Numerical results support our findings.
Many real world tasks such as reasoning and physical interaction require identification and manipulation of conceptual entities. A first step towards solving these tasks is the automated discovery of distributed symbol-like representations. In this paper, we explicitly formalize this problem as inference in a spatial mixture model where each component is parametrized by a neural network. Based on the Expectation Maximization framework we then derive a differentiable clustering method that simultaneously learns how to group and represent individual entities. We evaluate our method on the (sequential) perceptual grouping task and find that it is able to accurately recover the constituent objects. We demonstrate that the learned representations are useful for next-step prediction.
The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is of key importance for inference in latent variable models including mixture of regressors and experts, missing observations. This paper introduces a novel EM algorithm, called texttt{SPIDER-EM}, for inference from a training set of size $n$, $n gg 1$. At the core of our algorithm is an estimator of the full conditional expectation in the {sf E}-step, adapted from the stochastic path-integrated differential estimator ({tt SPIDER}) technique. We derive finite-time complexity bounds for smooth non-convex likelihood: we show that for convergence to an $epsilon$-approximate stationary point, the complexity scales as $K_{operatorname{Opt}} (n,epsilon )={cal O}(epsilon^{-1})$ and $K_{operatorname{CE}}( n,epsilon ) = n+ sqrt{n} {cal O}(epsilon^{-1} )$, where $K_{operatorname{Opt}}( n,epsilon )$ and $K_{operatorname{CE}}(n, epsilon )$ are respectively the number of {sf M}-steps and the number of per-sample conditional expectations evaluations. This improves over the state-of-the-art algorithms. Numerical results support our findings.
Any clustering algorithm must synchronously learn to model the clusters and allocate data to those clusters in the absence of labels. Mixture model-based methods model clusters with pre-defined statistical distributions and allocate data to those clusters based on the cluster likelihoods. They iteratively refine those distribution parameters and member assignments following the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. However, the cluster representability of such hand-designed distributions that employ a limited amount of parameters is not adequate for most real-world clustering tasks. In this paper, we realize mixture model-based clustering with a neural network where the final layer neurons, with the aid of an additional transformation, approximate cluster distribution outputs. The network parameters pose as the parameters of those distributions. The result is an elegant, much-generalized representation of clusters than a restricted mixture of hand-designed distributions. We train the network end-to-end via batch-wise EM iterations where the forward pass acts as the E-step and the backward pass acts as the M-step. In image clustering, the mixture-based EM objective can be used as the clustering objective along with existing representation learning methods. In particular, we show that when mixture-EM optimization is fused with consistency optimization, it improves the sole consistency optimization performance in clustering. Our trained networks outperform single-stage deep clustering methods that still depend on k-means, with unsupervised classification accuracy of 63.8% in STL10, 58% in CIFAR10, 25.9% in CIFAR100, and 98.9% in MNIST.