Supervised Learning:
Definition: In supervised learning, the training data includes both input features (such as images, text, or numerical
data) and corresponding labels (the desired output or target value).
Goal: The goal is to learn a mapping from inputs to outputs based on these labeled examples, allowing the model to
make accurate predictions on new, unseen data.
Applications: Image classification, spam detection, and speech recognition.
Unsupervised Learning:
No Labels: Unsupervised learning methods are used when the data is unlabeled, meaning that only input features are
provided. The task is to find hidden structures or patterns in the data.
Applications:
o Large-scale data mining problems, where manually labeling the data is impractical.
o Situations where the characteristics of the data may change over time (e.g., customer behavior in
marketing).
Advantages of Unsupervised Learning:
1. Cost-Effective: It eliminates the need for expensive and time-consuming labeling of large datasets.
2. Flexibility: Unsupervised learning can identify underlying patterns or features in the data without requiring
predefined labels, making it adaptable to many situations.
3. Improved Performance: Combining unsupervised learning with supervised learning (semi-supervised learning) can
sometimes boost model performance by leveraging the strengths of both approaches.
Potential Drawbacks of Unsupervised Learning:
1. Lack of Ground Truth: Without labeled data, evaluating the accuracy or effectiveness of unsupervised models can
be difficult, as there's no clear reference point for validation.
2. Interpretation: The patterns or clusters found by unsupervised learning methods can be challenging to interpret or
may not always align with meaningful real-world categories.
Mixture Models:
Underlying Probability Densities: The note mentions that mixture models assume the data comes from a
combination of underlying probability densities.
Identifiability: Identifiability refers to the uniqueness of the parameters in a model. In mixture models, it's often
challenging to uniquely determine the component densities and mixing proportions.
Assumptions:
Known Classes: The note lists several assumptions that are often made in mixture model analysis, including knowing
the number of classes or components.
Known Prior Probabilities: The prior probabilities of each class are assumed to be known.
Conditional Probabilities: The conditional probabilities of each class given the data are assumed to be known.
Unknown Parameters: The parameters of the component densities and mixing proportions are assumed to be
unknown.
Mixture Density Function:
Equation: The note provides the equation for the mixture density function, which is a weighted sum of the
component densities.
Component and Mixing Parameters: The equation includes the component densities (fᵢ(x)) and mixing proportions
(πᵢ).
1. Identifiability:
Definition: Identifiability in the context of mixture models refers to the ability to uniquely estimate the model
parameters (component densities and mixing proportions) based on the data. If a mixture model is identifiable, then
different sets of parameters will result in different probability distributions.
Importance: Identifiability is critical because without it, there may be multiple sets of parameters that explain the
data equally well, making it impossible to determine the true underlying model.
2. Decomposing Mixtures:
If the mixture model is identifiable, it can be decomposed into its individual component densities and their respective
mixing proportions. This means we can recover the underlying probability distributions (e.g., Gaussian, Bernoulli,
etc.) and the proportions (weights) of each component in the overall mixture.
Example: In a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), identifiability ensures we can separate the mixture into its
individual Gaussian components with distinct means and variances, along with their mixing proportions.
3. MAP Classifier (Maximum A Posteriori Classifier):
Definition: The Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) classifier is a Bayesian approach to classification. It selects the class
that has the highest posterior probability given the observed data.
