Christopher Tosh and Sanjoy Dasgupta
The mixing time of a Markov chain is the minimum time $t$ necessary for the total variation distance between the distribution of the Markov chain's current state $X_t$ and its stationary distribution to fall below some $\epsilon > 0$. In this paper, we present lower bounds for the mixing time of the Gibbs sampler over Gaussian mixture models with Dirichlet priors.
Uri Shalit and Gal Chechik
Optimizing over the set of orthogonal matrices is a central component in problems like sparse-PCA or tensor decomposition. Unfortunately, such optimization is hard since simple operations on orthogonal matrices easily break orthogonality, and correcting orthogonality usually costs a large amount of computation. Here we propose a framework for optimizing orthogonal matrices, that is the parallel of coordinate-descent in Euclidean spaces. It is based on {\em Givens-rotations