Online Learning of Hierarchical Pitman–Yor Process Mixture of Generalized Dirichlet Distributions With Feature Selection

In this paper, a novel statistical generative model based on hierarchical Pitman-Yor process and generalized Dirichlet distributions (GDs) is presented. The proposed model allows us to perform joint clustering and feature selection thanks to the interesting properties of the GD distribution. We develop an online variational inference algorithm, formulated in terms of the minimization of a Kullback-Leibler divergence, of our resulting model that tackles the problem of learning from high-dimensional examples. This variational Bayes formulation allows simultaneously estimating the parameters, determining the model’s complexity, and selecting the appropriate relevant features for the clustering structure. Moreover, the proposed online learning algorithm allows data instances to be processed in a sequential manner, which is critical for large-scale and real-time applications. Experiments conducted using challenging applications, namely, scene recognition and video segmentation, where our approach is viewed as an unsupervised technique for visual learning in high-dimensional spaces, showed that the proposed approach is suitable and promising.