Estimation and feature selection in high-dimensional mixtures-of-experts models

This thesis deals with the problem of modeling and estimation of high-dimensional MoE models, towards effective density estimation, prediction and clustering of such heterogeneous and high-dimensional data. We propose new strategies based on regularized maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE) of MoE models to overcome the limitations of standard methods, including MLE estimation with Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithms, and to simultaneously perform feature selection so that sparse models are encouraged in such a high-dimensional setting. We first introduce a mixture-of-experts’ parameter estimation and variable selection methodology, based on l1 (lasso) regularizations and the EM framework, for regression and clustering suited to high-dimensional contexts. Then, we extend the method to regularized mixture of experts models for discrete data, including classification. We develop efficient algorithms to maximize the proposed l1 -penalized observed-data log-likelihood function. Our proposed strategies enjoy the efficient monotone maximization of the optimized criterion, and unlike previous approaches, they do not rely on approximations on the penalty functions, avoid matrix inversion, and exploit the efficiency of the coordinate ascent algorithm, particularly within the proximal Newton-based approach.