The popularity of the EM algorithm owes much to the 1977 paper by Dempster,
Laird and Rubin. That paper gave the algorithm its name, identified the general
form and some key properties of the algorithm and established its broad
applicability in scientific research. This review gives a nontechnical
introduction to the algorithm for a general scientific audience, and presents a
few examples characteristic of its application.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-STS270 the Statistical
Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org