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  • Local Minima Structures in ...
    Chen, Yudong; Song, Dogyoon; Xi, Xumei; Zhang, Yuqian

    IEEE transactions on information theory, 06/2024, Volume: 70, Issue: 6
    Journal Article

    We investigate the landscape of the negative log-likelihood function of Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) with a general number of components in the population limit. As the objective function is non-convex, there can exist multiple spurious local minima that are not globally optimal, even for well-separated mixture models. Our study reveals that all local minima share a common structure that partially identifies the cluster centers (i.e., means of the Gaussian components) of the true location mixture. Specifically, each local minimum can be represented as a non-overlapping combination of two types of sub-configurations: 1) fitting a single mean estimate to multiple Gaussian components; or 2) fitting multiple estimates to a single true component. These results apply to settings where the true mixture components satisfy a certain separation condition, and are valid even when the number of components is over- or under-specified. We also present a more fine-grained analysis for the setting of one-dimensional GMMs with three components, which provide sharper approximation error bounds with improved dependence on the separation parameter.