Estimation of finite mixture models when the mixing distribution support is
unknown is an important problem. This paper gives a new approach based on a
marginal likelihood for the unknown support. Motivated by a Bayesian Dirichlet
prior model, a computationally efficient stochastic approximation version of
the marginal likelihood is proposed and large-sample theory is presented. By
restricting the support to a finite grid, a simulated annealing method is
employed to maximize the marginal likelihood and estimate the support. Real and
simulated data examples show that this novel stochastic
approximation--simulated annealing procedure compares favorably to existing
methods.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure, 3 table
