# Why is optimizing a mixture of Gaussian directly computationally hard?

Consider the log likelihood of a mixture of Gaussians:

$$l(S_n; \theta) = \sum^n_{t=1}\log f(x^{(t)}|\theta) = \sum^n_{t=1}\log\left\{\sum^k_{i=1}p_i f(x^{(t)}|\mu^{(i)}, \sigma^2_i)\right\}$$

I was wondering why it was computationally hard to maximize that equation directly? I was looking for either a clear solid intuition on why it should be obvious that its hard or maybe a more rigorous explanation of why its hard. Is this problem NP-complete or do we just not know how to solve it yet? Is this the reason we resort to use the EM (expectation-maximization) algorithm?

Notation:

$S_n$ = training data.

$x^{(t)}$ = data point.

$\theta$ = the set of parameters specifying the Gaussian, theirs means, standard deviations and the probability of generating a point from each cluster/class/Gaussian.

$p_i$ = the probability of generating a point from cluster/class/Gaussian i.

-

First, GMM is a particular algorithm for clustering, where you try to find the optimal labelling of your $n$ observations. Having $k$ possible classes, it means that there are $k^n$ possible labellings of your training data. This becomes already huge for moderate values of $k$ and $n$.

Second, the functional you are trying to minimize is not convex, and together with the size of your problem, makes it very hard. I only know that k-means (GMM can be seen as a soft version of kmeans) is NP-hard. But I am not aware of whether it has been proved for GMM as well.

To see that the problem is not convex, consider the one dimensional case: $$L = \log \left(e^{-({x}/{\sigma_{1}})^2} + e^{-({x}/{\sigma_{2}})^2}\right)$$ and check that you cannot guarantee that $\frac{d^2L}{dx^2} > 0$ for all x.

Having a non-convex problem means that you can get stuck in local minima. In general, you do not have the strong warranties you have in convex optimization, and searching for a solution is also much harder.

-
Regarding the second point: k-means can be viewed as a special case of GMMs (more precisely, a limit case where the variances are taken to zero). If we can reduce k-means to the fitting of a GMM, the latter must be an NP-hard problem as well. – Lucas Dec 20 '14 at 17:31
@Lucas: Here is a Cross Validated link to your remark. – Xi'an Dec 20 '14 at 18:14

In addition to juampa's points, let me signal those difficulties:

• The function $l(\theta|S_n)$ is unbounded, so the true maximum is $+\infty$ and corresponds to $\hat\mu^{(i)}=x_1$ (for instance) and $\hat\sigma_i=0$. A true maximiser should therefore end up with this solution, which is not useful for estimation purposes.
• Even without considering the $k^n$ terms in the decomposition of the product of sums as a sum of products in $l(\theta|S_n)$, the function to be maximised in $\theta$ is highly multi-modal (in addition to being non-convex) hence a challenge for numerical methods. EM acknowledges the difficulty by converging to a local mode or saddle point and requiring multiple runs. As shown on

taken from my book.

An additional remark: without calling the EM algorithm, one may use a standard optimisation algorithm (like Newton-Raphson) one parameter at a time, that is, iterate

• find $\theta_1^\prime=\arg\max_{\theta_1} l(\theta|S_n)$
• find $\theta_2^\prime=\arg\max_{\theta_2} l(\theta_1^\prime,\theta_{-1}|S_n)$
• ...
• find $\theta_v^\prime=\arg\max_{\theta_v} l(\theta_{-v}^\prime,\theta_v|S_n)$

if there are $v$ parameters and each step should increase the value of the target function $l(\theta|S_n)$, but this scheme will at best end up in the same mode as the EM algorithm.

-