  We study the problem of learning a distribution from samples, when the
underlying distribution is a mixture of product distributions over discrete
domains. This problem is motivated by several practical applications such as
crowd-sourcing, recommendation systems, and learning Boolean functions. The
existing solutions either heavily rely on the fact that the number of
components in the mixtures is finite or have sample/time complexity that is
exponential in the number of components. In this paper, we introduce a
polynomial time/sample complexity method for learning a mixture of $r$ discrete
product distributions over $\{1, 2, \dots, \ell\}^n$, for general $\ell$ and
$r$. We show that our approach is statistically consistent and further provide
finite sample guarantees.
  We use techniques from the recent work on tensor decompositions for
higher-order moment matching. A crucial step in these moment matching methods
is to construct a certain matrix and a certain tensor with low-rank spectral
decompositions. These tensors are typically estimated directly from the
samples. The main challenge in learning mixtures of discrete product
distributions is that these low-rank tensors cannot be obtained directly from
the sample moments. Instead, we reduce the tensor estimation problem to: $a$)
estimating a low-rank matrix using only off-diagonal block elements; and $b$)
estimating a tensor using a small number of linear measurements. Leveraging on
recent developments in matrix completion, we give an alternating minimization
based method to estimate the low-rank matrix, and formulate the tensor
completion problem as a least-squares problem.
