1. Finite mixtures of unimodal beta and gamma densities and the $$k$$-bumps algorithm.
- Author
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Bagnato, Luca and Punzo, Antonio
- Subjects
- *
FINITE mixture models (Statistics) , *MAXIMUM likelihood statistics , *CLUSTER analysis (Statistics) , *DISTRIBUTION (Probability theory) , *COMPUTER simulation , *PARAMETER estimation , *PROBLEM solving - Abstract
This paper addresses the problem of estimating a density, with either a compact support or a support bounded at only one end, exploiting a general and natural form of a finite mixture of distributions. Due to the importance of the concept of multimodality in the mixture framework, unimodal beta and gamma densities are used as mixture components, leading to a flexible modeling approach. Accordingly, a mode-based parameterization of the components is provided. A partitional clustering method, named $$k$$-bumps, is also proposed; it is used as an ad hoc initialization strategy in the EM algorithm to obtain the maximum likelihood estimation of the mixture parameters. The performance of the $$k$$-bumps algorithm as an initialization tool, in comparison to other common initialization strategies, is evaluated through some simulation experiments. Finally, two real applications are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2013
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