COMMENTS: EM-BASED LIKELIHOOD INFERENCE FOR SOME LIFETIME DISTRIBUTIONS BASED ON LEFT TRUNCATED AND RIGHT CENSORED DATA AND ASSOCIATED MODEL DISCRIMINATION

摘要

We would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Professors Balakrishnan and Mitra on a comprehensive review on the application of the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to left-truncated and right-censored data. We also thank the editor, Professor Maxim Finkelstein, for inviting us to discuss this interesting work. We will focus our discussion on using Stochastic Expectation-Maximization (SEM) algorithm, an alternative of EM-algorithm to approximate the maximum likelihood estimates (MLEs), for the problem of interest in the discussion paper.