EFFICIENT ESTIMATION OF ERLANG MIXTURES USING iSCAD PENALTY WITH INSURANCE APPLICATION

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 779-799 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cuihong Yin ◽  
X. Sheldon Lin

AbstractThe Erlang mixture model has been widely used in modeling insurance losses due to its desirable distributional properties. In this paper, we consider the problem of efficient estimation of the Erlang mixture model. We present a new thresholding penalty function and a corresponding EM algorithm to estimate model parameters and to determine the order of the mixture. Using simulation studies and a real data application, we demonstrate the efficiency of the EM algorithm.

Symmetry ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 2164
Author(s):  
Héctor J. Gómez ◽  
Diego I. Gallardo ◽  
Karol I. Santoro

In this paper, we present an extension of the truncated positive normal (TPN) distribution to model positive data with a high kurtosis. The new model is defined as the quotient between two random variables: the TPN distribution (numerator) and the power of a standard uniform distribution (denominator). The resulting model has greater kurtosis than the TPN distribution. We studied some properties of the distribution, such as moments, asymmetry, and kurtosis. Parameter estimation is based on the moments method, and maximum likelihood estimation uses the expectation-maximization algorithm. We performed some simulation studies to assess the recovery parameters and illustrate the model with a real data application related to body weight. The computational implementation of this work was included in the tpn package of the R software.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yupeng Li ◽  
Jianhua Zhang ◽  
Ruisi He ◽  
Lei Tian ◽  
Hewen Wei

In this paper, the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is introduced to the channel multipath clustering. In the GMM field, the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is usually utilized to estimate the model parameters. However, the EM widely converges into local optimization. To address this issue, a hybrid differential evolution (DE) and EM (DE-EM) algorithms are proposed in this paper. To be specific, the DE is employed to initialize the GMM parameters. Then, the parameters are estimated with the EM algorithm. Thanks to the global searching ability of DE, the proposed hybrid DE-EM algorithm is more likely to obtain the global optimization. Simulations demonstrate that our proposed DE-EM clustering algorithm can significantly improve the clustering performance.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samyajoy Pal ◽  
Christian Heumann

Abstract A generalized way of building mixture models using different distributions is explored in this article. The EM algorithm is used with some modifications to accommodate different distributions within the same model. The model uses any point estimate available for the respective distributions to estimate the mixture components and model parameters. The study is focused on the application of mixture models in unsupervised learning problems, especially cluster analysis. The convenience of building mixture models using the generalized approach is further emphasised by appropriate examples, exploiting the well-known maximum likelihood and Bayesian estimates of the parameters of the parent distributions.


2012 ◽  
Vol 532-533 ◽  
pp. 1445-1449
Author(s):  
Ting Ting Tong ◽  
Zhen Hua Wu

EM algorithm is a common method to solve mixed model parameters in statistical classification of remote sensing image. The EM algorithm based on fuzzification is presented in this paper to use a fuzzy set to represent each training sample. Via the weighted degree of membership, different samples will be of different effect during iteration to decrease the impact of noise on parameter learning and to increase the convergence rate of algorithm. The function and accuracy of classification of image data can be completed preferably.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (16) ◽  
pp. 5549
Author(s):  
Ossi Kaltiokallio ◽  
Roland Hostettler ◽  
Hüseyin Yiğitler ◽  
Mikko Valkama

Received signal strength (RSS) changes of static wireless nodes can be used for device-free localization and tracking (DFLT). Most RSS-based DFLT systems require access to calibration data, either RSS measurements from a time period when the area was not occupied by people, or measurements while a person stands in known locations. Such calibration periods can be very expensive in terms of time and effort, making system deployment and maintenance challenging. This paper develops an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm based on Gaussian smoothing for estimating the unknown RSS model parameters, liberating the system from supervised training and calibration periods. To fully use the EM algorithm’s potential, a novel localization-and-tracking system is presented to estimate a target’s arbitrary trajectory. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, it is shown that: (i) the system requires no calibration period; (ii) the EM algorithm improves the accuracy of existing DFLT methods; (iii) it is computationally very efficient; and (iv) the system outperforms a state-of-the-art adaptive DFLT system in terms of tracking accuracy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 362-375
Author(s):  
Tyler Strachan ◽  
Edward Ip ◽  
Yanyan Fu ◽  
Terry Ackerman ◽  
Shyh-Huei Chen ◽  
...  

As a method to derive a “purified” measure along a dimension of interest from response data that are potentially multidimensional in nature, the projective item response theory (PIRT) approach requires first fitting a multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) model to the data before projecting onto a dimension of interest. This study aims to explore how accurate the PIRT results are when the estimated MIRT model is misspecified. Specifically, we focus on using a (potentially misspecified) two-dimensional (2D)-MIRT for projection because of its advantages, including interpretability, identifiability, and computational stability, over higher dimensional models. Two large simulation studies (I and II) were conducted. Both studies examined whether the fitting of a 2D-MIRT is sufficient to recover the PIRT parameters when multiple nuisance dimensions exist in the test items, which were generated, respectively, under compensatory MIRT and bifactor models. Various factors were manipulated, including sample size, test length, latent factor correlation, and number of nuisance dimensions. The results from simulation studies I and II showed that the PIRT was overall robust to a misspecified 2D-MIRT. Smaller third and fourth simulation studies were done to evaluate recovery of the PIRT model parameters when the correctly specified higher dimensional MIRT or bifactor model was fitted with the response data. In addition, a real data set was used to illustrate the robustness of PIRT.


Mathematics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 373
Author(s):  
Branislav Panić ◽  
Jernej Klemenc ◽  
Marko Nagode

A commonly used tool for estimating the parameters of a mixture model is the Expectation–Maximization (EM) algorithm, which is an iterative procedure that can serve as a maximum-likelihood estimator. The EM algorithm has well-documented drawbacks, such as the need for good initial values and the possibility of being trapped in local optima. Nevertheless, because of its appealing properties, EM plays an important role in estimating the parameters of mixture models. To overcome these initialization problems with EM, in this paper, we propose the Rough-Enhanced-Bayes mixture estimation (REBMIX) algorithm as a more effective initialization algorithm. Three different strategies are derived for dealing with the unknown number of components in the mixture model. These strategies are thoroughly tested on artificial datasets, density–estimation datasets and image–segmentation problems and compared with state-of-the-art initialization methods for the EM. Our proposal shows promising results in terms of clustering and density-estimation performance as well as in terms of computational efficiency. All the improvements are implemented in the rebmix R package.


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-77
Author(s):  
Michael D. Regier ◽  
Erica E. M. Moodie

Abstract We propose an extension of the EM algorithm that exploits the common assumption of unique parameterization, corrects for biases due to missing data and measurement error, converges for the specified model when standard implementation of the EM algorithm has a low probability of convergence, and reduces a potentially complex algorithm into a sequence of smaller, simpler, self-contained EM algorithms. We use the theory surrounding the EM algorithm to derive the theoretical results of our proposal, showing that an optimal solution over the parameter space is obtained. A simulation study is used to explore the finite sample properties of the proposed extension when there is missing data and measurement error. We observe that partitioning the EM algorithm into simpler steps may provide better bias reduction in the estimation of model parameters. The ability to breakdown a complicated problem in to a series of simpler, more accessible problems will permit a broader implementation of the EM algorithm, permit the use of software packages that now implement and/or automate the EM algorithm, and make the EM algorithm more accessible to a wider and more general audience.


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