DYNAMIC MIXTURES OF FACTOR ANALYZERS TO CHARACTERIZE MULTIVARIATE AIR POLLUTANT EXPOSURES

The assessment of pollution exposure is based on the analysis of multivariate time series that include the concentrations of several pollutants as well as the measurements of multiple atmospheric variables. It typically requires methods of dimensionality reduction that are capable to identify potentially dangerous combinations of pollutants and, simultaneously, to segment exposure periods according to air quality conditions. When the data are high-dimensional, however, efficient methods of dimensionality reduction are challenging because of the formidable structure of cross-correlations that arise from the dynamic interaction between weather conditions and natural/anthropogenic pollution sources. In order to assess pollution exposure in an urban area while taking the above mentioned difficulties into account, we develop a class of parsimonious hidden Markov models. In a multivariate time-series setting, this approach allows to simultaneously perform temporal segmentation and dimensionality reduction. We specifically approximate the distribution of multiple pollutant concentrations by mixtures of factor analysis models, whose parameters evolve according to a latent Markov chain. Covariates are included as predictors of the chain transition probabilities. Parameter constraints on the factorial component of the model are exploited to tune the flexibility of dimensionality reduction. In order to estimate the model parameters efficiently, we propose a novel three-step Alternating Expected Conditional Maximization (AECM) algorithm, which is also assessed in a simulation study. In the case study, the proposed methods were capable (1) to describe the exposure to pollution in terms of a few latent regimes, (2) to associate these regimes with specific combinations of pollutant concentration levels as well as distinct correlation structures between concentrations, and (3) to capture the influence of weather conditions on transitions between regime

Robust, fuzzy, and parsimonious clustering based on mixtures of Factor Analyzers

A clustering algorithm that combines the advantages of fuzzy clustering and robust statistical estimators is presented. It is based on mixtures of Factor Analyzers, endowed by the joint usage of trimming and the constrained estimation of scatter matrices, in a modified maximum likelihood approach. The algorithm generates a set of membership values, that are used to fuzzy partition the data set and to contribute to the robust estimates of the mixture parameters. The adoption of clusters modeled by Gaussian Factor Analysis allows for dimension reduction and for discovering local linear structures in the data. The new methodology has been shown to be resistant to different types of contamination, by applying it on artificial data. A brief discussion on the tuning parameters, such as the trimming level, the fuzzifier parameter, the number of clusters and the value of the scatter matrices constraint, has been developed, also with the help of some heuristic tools for their choice. Finally, a real data set has been analyzed, to show how intermediate membership values are estimated for observations lying at cluster overlap, while cluster cores are composed by observations that are assigned to a cluster in a crisp way.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad grant MTM2017-86061-C2-1-P, y Consejería de Educación de la Junta de Castilla y León and FEDER grantVA005P17 y VA002G1

Mixtures of Common Skew-t Factor Analyzers

A mixture of common skew-t factor analyzers model is introduced for model-based clustering of high-dimensional data. By assuming common component factor loadings, this model allows clustering to be performed in the presence of a large number of mixture components or when the number of dimensions is too large to be well-modelled by the mixtures of factor analyzers model or a variant thereof. Furthermore, assuming that the component densities follow a skew-t distribution allows robust clustering of skewed data. The alternating expectation-conditional maximization algorithm is employed for parameter estimation. We demonstrate excellent clustering performance when our model is applied to real and simulated data.This paper marks the first time that skewed common factors have been used