Abstract
We introduce a novel algorithm to learn mixtures of Gamma distributions. This is an extension of the k-Maximum Likelihood Estimator algorithm for mixtures of exponential families. Although Gamma distributions are exponential families, we cannot rely directly on the exponential families tools due to the lack of closed-form formula and the cost of numerical approximation: our method uses Gamma distributions with a fixed rate parameter and a special step to choose this parameter is added in the algorithm. Since it converges locally and is computationally faster than an Expectation-Maximization method for Gamma mixture models, our method can be used beneficially as a drop-in replacement in any application using this kind of statistical models.
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Schwander, O., Nielsen, F. (2013). Fast Learning of Gamma Mixture Models with k-MLE. In: Hancock, E., Pelillo, M. (eds) Similarity-Based Pattern Recognition. SIMBAD 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7953. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39140-8_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39140-8_16
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