Supervised learning from incomplete data via an EM approach

Zoubin Ghahramani and Michael I. Jordan, Dept. of Brain & Cognitive Sciences,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139

Real-world learning tasks may involve high-dimensional data sets with arbitrary patterns of missing data. In this paper we present a framework based on maximum likelihood density estimation for learning from such data sets. We use mixture models for the density estimates and make two distinct appeals to the Expectation-Maximization (EM) principle (Dempster et al., 1977) in deriving a learning algorithm---EM is used both for the estimation of mixture components and for coping with missing data. The resulting algorithm is applicable to a wide range of supervised as well as unsupervised learning problems. Results from a classification benchmark---the iris data set---are presented.

In Cowan, J.D., Tesauro, G., and Alspector, J. (eds.). Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 6. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco, CA, 1994. [postscript] [pdf]


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