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Activity Number: 257
Type: Contributed
Date/Time: Monday, August 10, 2015 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
Sponsor: Section on Statistical Graphics
Abstract #315777 View Presentation
Title: A Visualization Tool for Assessing the Number of Components in Finite Mixture Models
Author(s): Derek Young*
Companies: University of Kentucky
Keywords: finite mixture models ; mixtools ; mixturegram ; parallel coordinate plot
Abstract:

Certain practical and theoretical challenges surround the estimation of mixture models. One such challenge is how to determine the number of components when this is not assumed a priori or when there is no strong separation between the component densities. The available methods in the literature are primarily numerical and lack any substantial visualization component. The ability to visualize an appropriate number of components for a mixture model can circumvent some of the theoretical problems underlying commonly-used methods, like information criteria and bootstrapping approaches. Our research fills this gap through development of a visualization tool called a finite mixturegram, which can be used to determine an appropriate number of components for a finite mixture model. This tool is easy to implement and provides a quick way for scientific researchers to assess the number of components for their hypothesized mixture models, regardless of the model complexity of each component. We provide a brief demonstration of the developed code, which will eventually appear in the R package mixtools.


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