Patent Document ID: 8504491
Application ID: 12787308
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A method of performing a variational EM algorithm on a computing device to compute a mixture model from data items in computer storage, the computing device comprising a processor and storage, the method comprising: generating, by the processor, and storing in the storage, a hierarchical data partition of the data items; initializing, by the processor, and storing in the storage, component-dependent data partitions of the data items in the hierarchical data partition that are specific to the mixture components, respectively, wherein each mixture component has its own respective different data partition; performing, by the processor, a variational Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm until convergence is determined, the performing comprising iteratively performing: a variational E-step that computes, and stores in the storage, a variational distribution by treating all data in a given component-dependent data partition as similar for a given mixture component that corresponds to the given component-dependent data partition, wherein at least two of the component-dependent data partitions are different partitionings of the data items for different mixture components and are partially overlapping and partially non-overlapping; and a variational M-step where a current parameter estimate for the mixture model is stored in the storage and updated based on the variational distribution.