A Selective Overview and Comparison of Robust Mixture Regression Estimators

摘要

Mixture regression models have been widely used in business, marketing and social sciences to model mixed regression relationships arising from a clustered and thus heterogeneous population. The unknown mixture regression parameters are usually estimated by maximum likelihood estimators using the expectation-maximisation algorithm based on the normality assumption of component error density. However, it is well known that the normality-based maximum likelihood estimation is very sensitive to outliers or heavy-tailed error distributions. This paper aims to give a selective overview of the recently proposed robust mixture regression methods and compare their performance using simulation studies.