TILOS Seminar: A Mixture of Past, Present, and Future

Arya Mazumdar, UC San Diego

Abstract: The problems of heterogeneity pose major challenges in extracting meaningful information from data as well as in the subsequent decision making or prediction tasks. Heterogeneity brings forward some very fundamental theoretical questions of machine learning. For unsupervised learning, a standard technique is the use of mixture models for statistical inference. However for supervised learning, labels can be generated via a mixture of functional relationships. We will provide a survey of results on parameter learning in mixture models, some unexpected connections with other problems, and some interesting future directions.