On 8-Jun-09, at 8:33 AM, Jason Rennie wrote:

Note that EM can be very slow to converge:

That's absolutely true, but EM for PCA can be a life saver in cases where diagonalizing (or even computing) the full covariance matrix is not a realistic option. Diagonalization can be a lot of wasted effort if all you care about are a few leading eigenvectors. EM also lets you deal with missing values in a principled way, which I don't think you can do with standard SVD.

EM certainly isn't a magic bullet but there are circumstances where it's appropriate. I'm a big fan of the ECG paper too. :)

David
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