Deep mixtures of factor analyzers with common loadings: A novel deep generative approach to clustering

Xi Yang, Kaizhu Huang*, Rui Zhang

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book or Report/Conference proceedingConference Proceedingpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel deep density model, called Deep Mixtures of Factor Analyzers with Common Loadings (DMCFA). Employing a mixture of factor analyzers sharing common component loadings, this novel model is more physically meaningful, since the common loadings can be regarded as feature selection or reduction matrices. Importantly, the novel DMCFA model is able to remarkably reduce the number of free parameters, making the involved inferences and learning problem dramatically easier. Despite its simplicity, by engaging learnable Gaussian distributions as the priors, DMCFA does not sacrifice its flexibility in estimating the data density. This is particularly the case when compared with the existing model Deep Mixtures of Factor Analyzers (DMFA), exploiting different loading matrices but simple standard Gaussian distributions for each component prior. We evaluate the performance of the proposed DMCFA in comparison with three other competitive models including Mixtures of Factor Analyzers (MFA), MCFA, and DMFA and their shallow counterparts. Results on four real data sets show that the novel model demonstrates significantly better performance in both density estimation and clustering.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationNeural Information Processing - 24th International Conference, ICONIP 2017, Proceedings
EditorsYuanqing Li, Derong Liu, Shengli Xie, El-Sayed M. El-Alfy, Dongbin Zhao
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages709-719
Number of pages11
ISBN (Print)9783319700861
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017
Event24th International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP 2017 - Guangzhou, China
Duration: 14 Nov 201718 Nov 2017

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume10634 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference24th International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP 2017
Country/TerritoryChina
CityGuangzhou
Period14/11/1718/11/17

Keywords

  • Common component factor loadings
  • Deep density model
  • Dimensionality reduction
  • Mixtures of factor analyzers

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Deep mixtures of factor analyzers with common loadings: A novel deep generative approach to clustering'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this