Theoretical guarantees for EM under misspecified Gaussian mixture models

Raaz Dwivedi, nhật Hồ, Koulik Khamaru, Martin J. Wainwright, Michael I. Jordan

Neural Information Processing Systems 

Recent years have witnessed substantial progress in understanding the behavior of EM for mixture models that are correctly specified. Given that model misspecification is common in practice, it is important to understand EM in this more general setting. We provide non-asymptotic guarantees for the population and sample-based EM algorithms when used to estimate parameters of certain misspecified Gaussian mixture models.