Finite mixture models do not reliably learn the number of components

Authors: Diana Cai, Trevor Campbell, Tamara Broderick

ICML 2021 | Conference PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details

Reproducibility Variable Result LLM Response
Research Type Experimental We illustrate practical consequences of our theory on simulated and real data.
Researcher Affiliation Academia 1Department of Computer Science, Princeton University 2Department of Statistics, University of British Columbia 3CSAIL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Pseudocode No The paper does not contain any structured pseudocode or algorithm blocks.
Open Source Code No The provided code link (https://github.com/jwmi/Bayesian Mixtures.jl) is for a Julia implementation of a finite mixture model that the authors used for their experiments to illustrate their theory. It is not code that implements the novel theoretical methodology described in the paper.
Open Datasets Yes single-cell RNA sequencing data from mouse cortex and hippocampus cells (Zeisel et al., 2015) and m RNA expression data from human lung tissue (Bhattacharjee et al., 2001)
Dataset Splits No The paper describes generating datasets of increasing sizes and using subsets contained within larger ones, and discarding burn-in iterations, but does not specify explicit train/validation/test splits in terms of percentages or counts for data partitioning.
Hardware Specification No The paper mentions using a "Julia implementation" but does not provide any specific details about the hardware (e.g., CPU, GPU models, memory) used for running the experiments.
Software Dependencies No The paper mentions using a "Julia implementation of split-merge collapsed Gibbs sampling" and links to "Bayesian Mixtures.jl" but does not specify version numbers for Julia or the package.
Experiment Setup Yes For all experiments below, we use a finite mixture model with a multivariate Gaussian component family having diagonal covariance matrices and a conjugate prior on each dimension...We set the hyperparameters of the Bayesian finite mixture model as follows: m = 1 2(maxn [ N] Xn+minn [ N] Xn) where N = 10,000, κ = (maxn [ N] Xn minn [ N] Xn) 2, α = 2, r = 0.1, γ = 1, and β Gam(0.2, 10/κ). We ran a total of 100,000 Markov chain Monte Carlo iterations per data set; we discarded the first 10,000 iterations as burn-in.