title: Decomposition of a mixture into normal components: a review.
abstract: The problem of estimating the parameters of a finite mixture of normal distributions has been considered by several researchers in different fields of application. This paper consists of a brief historical background and a comprehensive account of the theoretical aspects behind the principal lines of approach of different techniques of estimation. These include moment- and maximum likelihood estimation, estimation by minimum variance decomposition and graphical techniques. Further, three different methods of estimation are compared on medical data.
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D000818:Animals; D001499:Bayes Theorem; D005583:Fourier Analysis; D049673:History, 20th Century; D008722:Methods; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D013223:Statistics as Topic