Diagonally-Weighted Generalized Method of Moments Estimation for Gaussian Mixture Modeling

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zhang, Liu, Mickelin, Oscar, Xu, Sheng, Singer, Amit
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Zhang, Liu
Mickelin, Oscar
Xu, Sheng
Singer, Amit
author_facet Zhang, Liu
Mickelin, Oscar
Xu, Sheng
Singer, Amit
contents Since Pearson [Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. A, 185 (1894), pp. 71-110] first applied the method of moments (MM) for modeling data as a mixture of one-dimensional Gaussians, moment-based estimation methods have proliferated. Among these methods, the generalized method of moments (GMM) improves the statistical efficiency of MM by weighting the moments appropriately. However, the computational complexity and storage complexity of MM and GMM grow exponentially with the dimension, making these methods impractical for high-dimensional data or when higher-order moments are required. Such computational bottlenecks are more severe in GMM since it additionally requires estimating a large weighting matrix. To overcome these bottlenecks, we propose the diagonally-weighted GMM (DGMM), which achieves a balance among statistical efficiency, computational complexity, and numerical stability. We apply DGMM to study the parameter estimation problem for weakly separated heteroscedastic low-rank Gaussian mixtures and design a computationally efficient and numerically stable algorithm that obtains the DGMM estimator without explicitly computing or storing the moment tensors. We implement the proposed algorithm and empirically validate the advantages of DGMM: in numerical studies, DGMM attains smaller estimation errors while requiring substantially shorter runtime than MM and GMM. The code and data will be available upon publication at https://github.com/liu-lzhang/dgmm.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_20459
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Diagonally-Weighted Generalized Method of Moments Estimation for Gaussian Mixture Modeling
Zhang, Liu
Mickelin, Oscar
Xu, Sheng
Singer, Amit
Machine Learning
Numerical Analysis
Statistics Theory
Methodology
62F12, 62H30, 15A69, 65Y20
Since Pearson [Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. A, 185 (1894), pp. 71-110] first applied the method of moments (MM) for modeling data as a mixture of one-dimensional Gaussians, moment-based estimation methods have proliferated. Among these methods, the generalized method of moments (GMM) improves the statistical efficiency of MM by weighting the moments appropriately. However, the computational complexity and storage complexity of MM and GMM grow exponentially with the dimension, making these methods impractical for high-dimensional data or when higher-order moments are required. Such computational bottlenecks are more severe in GMM since it additionally requires estimating a large weighting matrix. To overcome these bottlenecks, we propose the diagonally-weighted GMM (DGMM), which achieves a balance among statistical efficiency, computational complexity, and numerical stability. We apply DGMM to study the parameter estimation problem for weakly separated heteroscedastic low-rank Gaussian mixtures and design a computationally efficient and numerically stable algorithm that obtains the DGMM estimator without explicitly computing or storing the moment tensors. We implement the proposed algorithm and empirically validate the advantages of DGMM: in numerical studies, DGMM attains smaller estimation errors while requiring substantially shorter runtime than MM and GMM. The code and data will be available upon publication at https://github.com/liu-lzhang/dgmm.
title Diagonally-Weighted Generalized Method of Moments Estimation for Gaussian Mixture Modeling
topic Machine Learning
Numerical Analysis
Statistics Theory
Methodology
62F12, 62H30, 15A69, 65Y20
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20459