18
3

Universal Approximation on the Hypersphere

Abstract

It is well known that any continuous probability density function on Rm\mathbb{R}^m can be approximated arbitrarily well by a finite mixture of normal distributions, provided that the number of mixture components is sufficiently large. The von-Mises-Fisher distribution, defined on the unit hypersphere SmS^m in Rm+1\mathbb{R}^{m+1}, has properties that are analogous to those of the multivariate normal on Rm+1\mathbb{R}^{m+1}. We prove that any continuous probability density function on SmS^m can be approximated to arbitrary degrees of accuracy by a finite mixture of von-Mises-Fisher distributions.

View on arXiv
Comments on this paper