## Breakdown points for maximum likelihood estimators of location-scale mixtures.(English)Zbl 1047.62063

Summary: ML-estimation based on mixtures of normal distributions is a widely used tool for cluster analysis. However, a single outlier can make the parameter estimation of at least one of the mixture components break down. Among others, the estimation of mixtures of t-distributions by G. McLachlan and D. Peel [Finite Mixture Models. (2000; Zbl 0963.62061)] and the addition of a further mixture component accounting for “noise” by C. Fraley and A. E. Raftery [Comput. J. 41, 578–588 (1998; Zbl 0920.68038)], were suggested as more robust alternatives.
In this paper, the definition of an adequate robustness measure for cluster analysis is discussed and bounds for the breakdown points of the mentioned methods are given. It turns out that the two alternatives, while adding stability in the presence of outliers of moderate size, do not possess a substantially better breakdown behavior than estimation based on normal mixtures. If the number of clusters $$s$$ is treated as fixed, $$r$$ additional points suffice for all three methods to let the parameters of $$r$$ clusters explode. Only in the case of $$r=s$$ this is not possible for $$t$$-mixtures. The ability to estimate the number of mixture components, for example, by use of the Bayesian information criterion of G. Schwarz [Ann. Stat. 6, 461–464 (1978; Zbl 0379.62005)], and to isolate gross outliers as clusters of one point, is crucial for an improved breakdown behavior of all three techniques. Furthermore, a mixture of normals with an improper uniform distribution is proposed to achieve more robustness in the case of a fixed number of components.

### MSC:

 62H30 Classification and discrimination; cluster analysis (statistical aspects) 62F35 Robustness and adaptive procedures (parametric inference) 62F10 Point estimation

### Citations:

Zbl 0963.62061; Zbl 0920.68038; Zbl 0379.62005
Full Text:

### References:

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