ISEM Seminar Series
“One-shot Distributed Clustering"by Dr WANG Yudong Associate Professor Faculty of Business Administration, University of Macau |
| 12 October 2026 (Monday), 4pm – 5pm Venue: E1-06-09 |
| ABSTRACT
Probabilistic clustering based on mixture models is widely used in biomedical studies. With the increasing availability of multi-site data, joint analyses across multiple sites offer opportunities to improve the efficiency and generalizability of clustering methods. However, data-sharing restrictions and between-site heterogeneity present significant challenges for multi-site probabilistic clustering. To address between-site heterogeneity, we propose a heterogeneous mixture model in which different sites share the same mixture components but have site-specific mixing proportions. This structure accounts for site-level heterogeneities while leveraging shared information across sites. Due to data-sharing restrictions, distributed inference of this heterogeneous mixture model is challenging. One potential approach is the use of distributed Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithms for federated maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Nevertheless, the existing distributed EM algorithm requires cross-site communication in every iteration, leading to considerable communication overhead in terms of personnel and time. In this talk, we will introduce a novel one-shot distributed learning algorithm for communication-efficient inference of the heterogeneous mixture model. We provide theoretical guarantee that our approach achieves the full-sample efficiency via only one single round of cross-site communication. The effectiveness of the approach are demonstrated through an application to multi-site electronic health records (EHR) data, illustrating how they enable efficient probabilistic clustering and facilitate targeted interventions. |
| Yudong Wang is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Business Administration, University of Macau. He obtained his PhD from the ISEM department at the National University of Singapore. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the Division of Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania from 2023 to 2025, where he worked with Professor Yong Chen. His research interests include distributed learning, semiparametric inference, and industrial statistics. His work has been published in leading statistics journals including JASA, Biometrika, JRSS-B, and JMLR. |

