Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Small-Variance Asymptotics for Exponential Family Dirichlet Process Mixture Models

Journal article published in 2012 by Ke Jiang, Brian Kulis, Michael I. Jordan ORCID
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

Full text: Download

Question mark in circle
Preprint: policy unknown
Question mark in circle
Postprint: policy unknown
Question mark in circle
Published version: policy unknown

Abstract

Sampling and variational inference techniques are two standard methods for in-ference in probabilistic models, but for many problems, neither approach scales effectively to large-scale data. An alternative is to relax the probabilistic model into a non-probabilistic formulation which has a scalable associated algorithm. This can often be fulfilled by performing small-variance asymptotics, i.e., letting the variance of particular distributions in the model go to zero. For instance, in the context of clustering, such an approach yields connections between the k-means and EM algorithms. In this paper, we explore small-variance asymptotics for exponential family Dirichlet process (DP) and hierarchical Dirichlet process (HDP) mixture models. Utilizing connections between exponential family distri-butions and Bregman divergences, we derive novel clustering algorithms from the asymptotic limit of the DP and HDP mixtures that features the scalability of exist-ing hard clustering methods as well as the flexibility of Bayesian nonparametric models. We focus on special cases of our analysis for discrete-data problems, in-cluding topic modeling, and we demonstrate the utility of our results by applying variants of our algorithms to problems arising in vision and document analysis.