An alternative perspective on the mixture estimation problem

The paper presents an alternative perspective on the mixture estimation problem. First, observations are counted into a histogram. Secondly, rough and enhanced parameter estimation followed by the separation of observations is done. Finally, the residue is distributed between the components by the Bayes decision rule. The number of components, the mixture component parameters and the component weights are modelled jointly, no initial parameter estimates are required, the approach is numerically stable, the number of components has no influence upon the convergence and the speed of convergence is very high. The alternative perspective is compared to the EM algorithm and verified through several data sets. The presented algorithm showed significant advantages compared to the competitive methods and has already been successfully applied in reliability and fatigue analyses.