23,090 research outputs found
Mixtures of Shifted Asymmetric Laplace Distributions
A mixture of shifted asymmetric Laplace distributions is introduced and used
for clustering and classification. A variant of the EM algorithm is developed
for parameter estimation by exploiting the relationship with the general
inverse Gaussian distribution. This approach is mathematically elegant and
relatively computationally straightforward. Our novel mixture modelling
approach is demonstrated on both simulated and real data to illustrate
clustering and classification applications. In these analyses, our mixture of
shifted asymmetric Laplace distributions performs favourably when compared to
the popular Gaussian approach. This work, which marks an important step in the
non-Gaussian model-based clustering and classification direction, concludes
with discussion as well as suggestions for future work
Parsimonious Shifted Asymmetric Laplace Mixtures
A family of parsimonious shifted asymmetric Laplace mixture models is
introduced. We extend the mixture of factor analyzers model to the shifted
asymmetric Laplace distribution. Imposing constraints on the constitute parts
of the resulting decomposed component scale matrices leads to a family of
parsimonious models. An explicit two-stage parameter estimation procedure is
described, and the Bayesian information criterion and the integrated completed
likelihood are compared for model selection. This novel family of models is
applied to real data, where it is compared to its Gaussian analogue within
clustering and classification paradigms
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