Patent Document ID: 20110295567
Application ID: 12787308
Patent Flag: 0

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 method comprising: generating a hierarchical data partition of the data items; initializing component-dependent data partitions of the data items in the hierarchical data partition that are specific to the mixture components; performing a variational Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm until convergence is determined, the performing comprising iteratively performing: a variational E-step that computes a variational distribution by treating all data in a component-dependent data partition as similar for a mixture component, wherein at least two of the component-dependent data partitions are different for different mixture components; and a variational M-step where a current parameter estimate for the mixture model is updated based on the variational distribution.