This book puts its weight on theoretical issues related to finite mixture models. It shows that a good applicant, is an applicant who understands the issues behind each statistical method. This book is intended for applicants whose interests include some understanding of the procedures they are using, while they do not have to read the technical derivations. At the same time, many researchers find most theories and techniques necessary for the development of various statistical methods, without chasing after one set of research papers, after another. Even though the book emphasizes the theory, it provides accessible numerical tools for data analysis. Readers with strength in developing statistical software, may find it useful.
This festschrift includes papers authored by many collaborators, colleagues, and students of Professor Thomas P Hettmansperger, who worked in research in nonparametric statistics, rank statistics, robustness, and mixture models during a career that spanned nearly 40 years. It is a broad sample of peer-reviewed, cutting-edge research related to nonparametrics and mixture models.
There have been major developments in the field of statistics over the last quarter century, spurred by the rapid advances in computing and data-measurement technologies. These developments have revolutionized the field and have greatly influenced research directions in theory and methodology. Increased computing power has spawned entirely new areas of research in computationally-intensive methods, allowing us to move away from narrowly applicable parametric techniques based on restrictive assumptions to much more flexible and realistic models and methods. These computational advances have also led to the extensive use of simulation and Monte Carlo techniques in statistical inference. All of these developments have, in turn, stimulated new research in theoretical statistics. This volume provides an up-to-date overview of recent advances in statistical modeling and inference. Written by renowned researchers from across the world, it discusses flexible models, semi-parametric methods and transformation models, nonparametric regression and mixture models, survival and reliability analysis, and re-sampling techniques. With its coverage of methodology and theory as well as applications, the book is an essential reference for researchers, graduate students, and practitioners.
This book focuses on recent advances, approaches, theories and applications related to mixture models. In particular, it presents recent unsupervised and semi-supervised frameworks that consider mixture models as their main tool. The chapters considers mixture models involving several interesting and challenging problems such as parameters estimation, model selection, feature selection, etc. The goal of this book is to summarize the recent advances and modern approaches related to these problems. Each contributor presents novel research, a practical study, or novel applications based on mixture models, or a survey of the literature. Reports advances on classic problems in mixture modeling such as parameter estimation, model selection, and feature selection; Present theoretical and practical developments in mixture-based modeling and their importance in different applications; Discusses perspectives and challenging future works related to mixture modeling.
The Minimum Message Length (MML) Principle is an information-theoretic approach to induction, hypothesis testing, model selection, and statistical inference. MML, which provides a formal specification for the implementation of Occam's Razor, asserts that the ‘best’ explanation of observed data is the shortest. Further, an explanation is acceptable (i.e. the induction is justified) only if the explanation is shorter than the original data. This book gives a sound introduction to the Minimum Message Length Principle and its applications, provides the theoretical arguments for the adoption of the principle, and shows the development of certain approximations that assist its practical application. MML appears also to provide both a normative and a descriptive basis for inductive reasoning generally, and scientific induction in particular. The book describes this basis and aims to show its relevance to the Philosophy of Science. Statistical and Inductive Inference by Minimum Message Length will be of special interest to graduate students and researchers in Machine Learning and Data Mining, scientists and analysts in various disciplines wishing to make use of computer techniques for hypothesis discovery, statisticians and econometricians interested in the underlying theory of their discipline, and persons interested in the Philosophy of Science. The book could also be used in a graduate-level course in Machine Learning and Estimation and Model-selection, Econometrics and Data Mining. C.S. Wallace was appointed Foundation Chair of Computer Science at Monash University in 1968, at the age of 35, where he worked until his death in 2004. He received an ACM Fellowship in 1995, and was appointed Professor Emeritus in 1996. Professor Wallace made numerous significant contributions to diverse areas of Computer Science, such as Computer Architecture, Simulation and Machine Learning. His final research focused primarily on the Minimum Message Length Principle.
