Fast Moment Estimation for Generalized Latent Dirichlet Models.

ABSTRACT: We develop a generalized method of moments (GMM) approach for fast parameter estimation in a new class of Dirichlet latent variable models with mixed data types. Parameter estimation via GMM has computational and statistical advantages over alternative methods, such as expectation maximization, variational inference, and Markov chain Monte Carlo. A key computational advantage of our method, Moment Estimation for latent Dirichlet models (MELD), is that parameter estimation does not require instantiation of the latent variables. Moreover, performance is agnostic to distributional assumptions of the observations. We derive population moment conditions after marginalizing out the sample-specific Dirichlet latent variables. The moment conditions only depend on component mean parameters. We illu

SUBMITTER: Zhao S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9302535 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature