In the fitting of mixture of linear regression models, the normal assumption has been traditionally used for the error term and then the regression parameters are estimated by the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE). Unlike the least squares estimate (LSE) for linear regression model, the validity of the MLE for mixtures of regression depends on the normal assumption. In order to relax the strong parametric assumption about the error density, in this article, we propose a mixture of linear regression model with unknown error density. We prove the identifiability of our proposed model and provide the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimates. In addition, we will propose an EM-type algorithm which uses a kernel density estimator for the unknown error when calculating the classification probabilities in the E step. Using a Monte Carlo simulation study, we demonstrate that our method works comparably to the traditional MLE when the error is normal. In addition, we demonstrate the success of our new estimation procedure when the error is not normal. An empirical analysis of tone perception data is illustrated for the proposed methodology.
姚卫鑫,加州大学河滨分校统计学系教授、副系主任。于2007年在宾夕法尼亚州立大学获得统计学博士学位。曾担任多家著名统计期刊的副主编,包括Biometrics、Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics、Journal of Multivariate Analysis和The American Statistician。于2020-2021年任Advances in Data Analysis and Classification杂志客座主编。研究领域包括混合模型、非参数和半参数建模、稳健数据分析和高维建模。