title: Variational learning for finite Dirichlet mixture models and applications.
abstract: In this paper, we focus on the variational learning of finite Dirichlet mixture models. Compared to other algorithms that are commonly used for mixture models (such as expectation-maximization), our approach has several advantages: first, the problem of over-fitting is prevented; furthermore, the complexity of the mixture model (i.e., the number of components) can be determined automatically and simultaneously with the parameters estimation as part of the Bayesian inference procedure; finally, since the whole inference process is analytically tractable with closed-form solutions, it may scale well to large applications. Both synthetic and real data, generated from real-life challenging applications namely image databases categorization and anomaly intrusion detection, are experimented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
authors.forename: Wentao
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Fan
authors.forename: Nizar
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Bouguila
authors.forename: Djemel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Ziou