Proportional data modeling via entropy-based variational bayes learning of mixture models

During the last few decades, many statistical approaches that were developed in the fields of computer vision and pattern recognition are based on mixture models. A mixture-based representation has a number of advantages: mixture models are generative, flexible, plus they can take prior information into account to improve the generalization capability. The mixture models that we consider in this paper are based on the Dirichlet and generalized Dirichlet distributions that have been widely used to represent proportional data. The novel aspect of this paper is to develop an entropy-based framework to learn these mixture models. Specifically, we propose a Bayesian framework for model learning by means of a sophisticated entropy-based variational Bayes technique. We present experimental results to show that the proposed method is effective in several applications namely person identity verification, 3D object recognition, text document clustering, and gene expression categorization.