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arXiv · 1301.0586

Staged Mixture Modelling and Boosting

Christopher Meek·Bo Thiesson·David Heckerman
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Abstract

In this paper, we introduce and evaluate a data-driven staged mixture modeling technique for building density, regression, and classification models. Our basic approach is to sequentially add components to a finite mixture model using the structural expectation maximization (SEM) algorithm. We show that our technique is qualitatively similar to boosting. This correspondence is a natural byproduct of the fact that we use the SEM algorithm to sequentially fit the mixture model. Finally, in our experimental evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a variety of prediction and density estimation tasks using real-world data.

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Christopher Meek, Bo Thiesson, David Heckerman. 2012-12-12. Staged Mixture Modelling and Boosting. https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.0586

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