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arXiv · 1305.4669

Parsimonious mixtures of multivariate contaminated normal distributions

Antonio Punzo·Paul D. McNicholas
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Abstract

A mixture of multivariate contaminated normal distributions is developed for model-based clustering. In addition to the parameters of the classical normal mixture, our contaminated mixture has, for each cluster, a parameter controlling the proportion of mild outliers and one specifying the degree of contamination. Crucially, these parameters do not have to be specified a priori, adding a flexibility to our approach. Parsimony is introduced via eigen-decomposition of the component covariance matrices, and sufficient conditions for the identifiability of all the members of the resulting family are provided. An expectation-conditional maximization algorithm is outlined for parameter estimation and various implementation issues are discussed. Using a large scale simulation study, the behaviour of the proposed approach is investigated and comparison with well-established finite mixtures is provided. The performance of this novel family of models is also illustrated on artificial and real data.

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Antonio Punzo, Paul D. McNicholas. 2013-05-20. Parsimonious mixtures of multivariate contaminated normal distributions. https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.4669

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