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Monotonic Likelihood Ascent of EM

The log-likelihood decomposes as log p(X | theta) = L(q, theta) + KL(q || p(Z | X, theta)); the E-step closes the KL gap to zero and the M-step raises the lower bound L, so via Jensen's inequality each full EM iteration can never decrease the data log-likelihood.

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The log-likelihood decomposes as log p(X | theta) = L(q, theta) + KL(q || p(Z | X, theta)); the E-step closes the KL gap to zero and the M-step raises the lower bound L, so via Jensen's inequality each full EM iteration can never decrease the data log-likelihood.

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