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Plot Gmm

================================= Gaussian Mixture Model Ellipsoids

Plot the confidence ellipsoids of a mixture of two Gaussians obtained with Expectation Maximisation (GaussianMixture class) and Variational Inference (BayesianGaussianMixture class models with a Dirichlet process prior).

Both models have access to five components with which to fit the data. Note that the Expectation Maximisation model will necessarily use all five components while the Variational Inference model will effectively only use as many as are needed for a good fit. Here we can see that the Expectation Maximisation model splits some components arbitrarily, because it is trying to fit too many components, while the Dirichlet Process model adapts it number of state automatically.

This example doesn’t show it, as we’re in a low-dimensional space, but another advantage of the Dirichlet process model is that it can fit full covariance matrices effectively even when there are less examples per cluster than there are dimensions in the data, due to regularization properties of the inference algorithm.

Imports for Gaussian Mixture Model vs Bayesian GMM Comparison

EM-based GaussianMixture always uses all specified components regardless of data structure: The Expectation-Maximization algorithm iterates between assigning soft responsibilities (E-step) and updating component parameters (M-step) until convergence, but it has no mechanism to eliminate unnecessary components. When n_components=5 is specified for data generated from only 2 Gaussians, EM will split the natural clusters into arbitrary sub-components to make use of all five, producing a model that fits the training data well but misrepresents the true generative structure. The confidence ellipses are computed from the eigendecomposition of each component’s covariance matrix using scipy.linalg.eigh, with semi-axes scaled to 2*sqrt(2)*sqrt(eigenvalue) to represent approximately 95% of each Gaussian’s density.

BayesianGaussianMixture with a Dirichlet process prior automatically discovers the correct number of components: By placing a stick-breaking prior on the mixing weights, the variational inference algorithm drives unnecessary component weights toward zero, effectively “turning off” unused components even when n_components=5 is specified as an upper bound. Components with zero weight are excluded from the plot (the if not np.any(Y_ == i): continue check), so only the active components appear. This automatic model selection is particularly valuable in high-dimensional settings where full covariance matrices have many parameters – the Bayesian regularization prevents overfitting even when the number of observations per cluster is small relative to the feature dimensionality.

# Authors: The scikit-learn developers
# SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause

import itertools

import matplotlib as mpl
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
from scipy import linalg

from sklearn import mixture

color_iter = itertools.cycle(["navy", "c", "cornflowerblue", "gold", "darkorange"])

def plot_results(X, Y_, means, covariances, index, title):
    splot = plt.subplot(2, 1, 1 + index)
    for i, (mean, covar, color) in enumerate(zip(means, covariances, color_iter)):
        v, w = linalg.eigh(covar)
        v = 2.0 * np.sqrt(2.0) * np.sqrt(v)
        u = w[0] / linalg.norm(w[0])
        # as the DP will not use every component it has access to
        # unless it needs it, we shouldn't plot the redundant
        # components.
        if not np.any(Y_ == i):
            continue
        plt.scatter(X[Y_ == i, 0], X[Y_ == i, 1], 0.8, color=color)

        # Plot an ellipse to show the Gaussian component
        angle = np.arctan(u[1] / u[0])
        angle = 180.0 * angle / np.pi  # convert to degrees
        ell = mpl.patches.Ellipse(mean, v[0], v[1], angle=180.0 + angle, color=color)
        ell.set_clip_box(splot.bbox)
        ell.set_alpha(0.5)
        splot.add_artist(ell)

    plt.xlim(-9.0, 5.0)
    plt.ylim(-3.0, 6.0)
    plt.xticks(())
    plt.yticks(())
    plt.title(title)


# Number of samples per component
n_samples = 500

# Generate random sample, two components
np.random.seed(0)
C = np.array([[0.0, -0.1], [1.7, 0.4]])
X = np.r_[
    np.dot(np.random.randn(n_samples, 2), C),
    0.7 * np.random.randn(n_samples, 2) + np.array([-6, 3]),
]

# Fit a Gaussian mixture with EM using five components
gmm = mixture.GaussianMixture(n_components=5, covariance_type="full").fit(X)
plot_results(X, gmm.predict(X), gmm.means_, gmm.covariances_, 0, "Gaussian Mixture")

# Fit a Dirichlet process Gaussian mixture using five components
dpgmm = mixture.BayesianGaussianMixture(n_components=5, covariance_type="full").fit(X)
plot_results(
    X,
    dpgmm.predict(X),
    dpgmm.means_,
    dpgmm.covariances_,
    1,
    "Bayesian Gaussian Mixture with a Dirichlet process prior",
)

plt.show()