Costis Daskalakis

Bootstrapping EM via Power EM and Convergence in the Naive Bayes Model

We study the convergence properties of the Expectation-Maximization algorithm in the Naive Bayes model. We show that EM can get stuck in regions of slow convergence, even when the features are binary and i.i.d. conditioning on the class label, and even under random (i.e. non worst-case) initializati…