2017/11/21 by Val Andrei Fajardo, Fajardo, Val Andrei, Jiaxi Liang +1
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · #Algorithms and Data Compression #Blind Source Separation Techniques #DNA and Biological Computing #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (stat.ML)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1711.07814
openalex publication_date 2017/11/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The EM algorithm is one of many important tools in the field of statistics. While often used for imputing missing data, its widespread applications include other common statistical tasks, such as clustering. In clustering, the EM algorithm assumes a parametric distribution for the clusters, whose parameters are estimated through a novel iterative procedure that is based on the theory of maximum likelihood. However, one major drawback of the EM algorithm, that renders it impractical especially when working with large datasets, is that it often requires several passes of the data before convergence. In this paper, we introduce a new EM-style algorithm that implements a novel policy for performing partial E-steps. We call the new algorithm the EM-Tau algorithm, which can approximate the traditional EM algorithm with high accuracy but with only a fraction of the running time.