Convex Relaxation of Mixture Regression with Efficient Algorithms

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 22 (NIPS 2009)

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Authors

Novi Quadrianto, John Lim, Dale Schuurmans, Tibério Caetano

Abstract

We develop a convex relaxation of maximum a posteriori estimation of a mixture of regression models. Although our relaxation involves a semidefinite matrix variable, we reformulate the problem to eliminate the need for general semidefinite programming. In particular, we provide two reformulations that admit fast algorithms. The first is a max-min spectral reformulation exploiting quasi-Newton descent. The second is a min-min reformulation consisting of fast alternating steps of closed-form updates. We evaluate the methods against Expectation-Maximization in a real problem of motion segmentation from video data.