The Infinite Gaussian Mixture Model

Carl Edward Rasmussen, Department of Mathematical Modelling, Technical University of Denmark

In a Bayesian mixture model it is not necessary a priori to limit the number of components to be finite. In this paper an infinite Gaussian mixture model is presented which neatly sidesteps the difficult problem of finding the ``right'' number of mixture components. Inference in the model is done using an efficient parameter-free Markov Chain that relies entirely on Gibbs sampling.

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 12, S.A. Solla, T.K. Leen and K.-R. Müller (eds.), pp. 554-560, MIT Press (2000).

Available as ps pdf.