Gossip-based greedy Gaussian mixture learning

peer reviewedIt has been recently demonstrated that the classical EM algorithm for learning Gaussian mixture models can be successfully implemented in a decentralized manner by resorting to gossip-based randomized distributed protocols. In this paper we describe a gossip-based implementation of an alternative algorithm for learning Gaussian mixtures in which components are added to the mixture one after another. Our new Greedy Gossip-based Gaussian mixture learning algorithm uses gossip-based parallel search, starting from multiple initial guesses, for finding good components to add to the mixture in each component allocation step. It can be executed on massive networks of small computing devices, converging to a solution exponentially faster than its centralized version, while reaching the same quality of generated models