Model Selection for Gaussian-gated Gaussian Mixture of Experts Using Dendrograms of Mixing Measures

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Main Authors: Thai, Tuan, Nguyen, TrungTin, Do, Dat, Ho, Nhat, Drovandi, Christopher
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Thai, Tuan
Nguyen, TrungTin
Do, Dat
Ho, Nhat
Drovandi, Christopher
author_facet Thai, Tuan
Nguyen, TrungTin
Do, Dat
Ho, Nhat
Drovandi, Christopher
contents Mixture of Experts (MoE) models constitute a widely utilized class of ensemble learning approaches in statistics and machine learning, known for their flexibility and computational efficiency. They have become integral components in numerous state-of-the-art deep neural network architectures, particularly for analyzing heterogeneous data across diverse domains. Despite their practical success, the theoretical understanding of model selection, especially concerning the optimal number of mixture components or experts, remains limited and poses significant challenges. These challenges primarily stem from the inclusion of covariates in both the Gaussian gating functions and expert networks, which introduces intrinsic interactions governed by partial differential equations with respect to their parameters. In this paper, we revisit the concept of dendrograms of mixing measures and introduce a novel extension to Gaussian-gated Gaussian MoE models that enables consistent estimation of the true number of mixture components and achieves the pointwise optimal convergence rate for parameter estimation in overfitted scenarios. Notably, this approach circumvents the need to train and compare a range of models with varying numbers of components, thereby alleviating the computational burden, particularly in high-dimensional or deep neural network settings. Experimental results on synthetic data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in accurately recovering the number of experts. It outperforms common criteria such as the Akaike information criterion, the Bayesian information criterion, and the integrated completed likelihood, while achieving optimal convergence rates for parameter estimation and accurately approximating the regression function.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_13052
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Model Selection for Gaussian-gated Gaussian Mixture of Experts Using Dendrograms of Mixing Measures
Thai, Tuan
Nguyen, TrungTin
Do, Dat
Ho, Nhat
Drovandi, Christopher
Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
Computation
Methodology
Mixture of Experts (MoE) models constitute a widely utilized class of ensemble learning approaches in statistics and machine learning, known for their flexibility and computational efficiency. They have become integral components in numerous state-of-the-art deep neural network architectures, particularly for analyzing heterogeneous data across diverse domains. Despite their practical success, the theoretical understanding of model selection, especially concerning the optimal number of mixture components or experts, remains limited and poses significant challenges. These challenges primarily stem from the inclusion of covariates in both the Gaussian gating functions and expert networks, which introduces intrinsic interactions governed by partial differential equations with respect to their parameters. In this paper, we revisit the concept of dendrograms of mixing measures and introduce a novel extension to Gaussian-gated Gaussian MoE models that enables consistent estimation of the true number of mixture components and achieves the pointwise optimal convergence rate for parameter estimation in overfitted scenarios. Notably, this approach circumvents the need to train and compare a range of models with varying numbers of components, thereby alleviating the computational burden, particularly in high-dimensional or deep neural network settings. Experimental results on synthetic data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in accurately recovering the number of experts. It outperforms common criteria such as the Akaike information criterion, the Bayesian information criterion, and the integrated completed likelihood, while achieving optimal convergence rates for parameter estimation and accurately approximating the regression function.
title Model Selection for Gaussian-gated Gaussian Mixture of Experts Using Dendrograms of Mixing Measures
topic Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
Computation
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13052