Dirichlet process HMM mixture models with application to music analysis

A hidden Markov mixture model is developed using a Dirichlet process (DP) prior, to represent the statistics of sequential data for which a single hidden Markov model (HMM) may not be sufficient. The DP prior has an intrinsic clustering property that encourages parameter sharing, naturally revealing the proper number of mixture components. The evaluation of posterior distributions for all model parameters is achieved via a variational Bayes formulation. We focus on exploring music similarities as an important application, highlighting the effectiveness of the HMM mixture model. Experimental results are presented from classical music clips.