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A simple root selection method for univariate finite normal mixture models

Abstract– It is well known that there exist multiple roots of the likelihood equations for finite normal mixture models. Selecting a consistent root for finite normal mixture models has long been a challenging problem. Simply using the root with the largest likelihood will not work because of the spurious roots. In addition, the likelihood of normal mixture models with unequal variance is unbounded and thus its maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) is not well defined. In this paper, we propose a simple root selection method for univariate normal mixture models by incorporating the idea of goodness of fit test. Our new method inherits both the consistency properties of distance estimators and the efficiency of the MLE. The new method is simple to use and its computation can be easily done using existing R packages for mixture models. In addition, the proposed root selection method is very general and can be also applied to other univariate mixture models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and compare it with some other existing methods through simulation studies and a real data application.