Gaussian Mixture Optimization Based on Efficient Cross-Validation

A Gaussian mixture optimization method is developed by using the cross-validation (CV) likelihood as an objective function instead of the conventional training set likelihood. The optimization is based on reducing the number of mixture components by selecting and merging pairs of Gaussians step by step according to the objective function so as to remove redundant components and improve the generality of the model. The CV likelihood is more effective for avoiding over-fitting than is the conventional likelihood, and it provides a termination criterion that does not rely on empirical thresholds. While the idea is simple, one problem is its infeasible computational cost. To make such optimization practical, an efficient evaluation algorithm using sufficient statistics is proposed. In addition, aggregated CV (AgCV) is developed to further improve the generalization performance of CV. Large-vocabulary speech recognition experiments on oral presentations show that the proposed methods improve speech recognition performance with automatically determined model complexity. The AgCV-based optimization is computationally more expensive than the CV-based method but gives better recognition performance.