The classification of twin pairs based on zygosity into monozygotic (MZ) or dizygotic (DZ) twins is the basis of most twin analyses. When zygosity information is unavailable, a normal finite mixture distribution (mixture distribution) model can be used to estimate components of variation for continuous traits. The main assumption of this model is that the observed phenotypes on a twin pair are ...

A class of adaptive sampling methods is introduced for efficient posterior and predictive simulation. The proposed methods are robust in the sense that they can handle target distributions that exhibit non-elliptical shapes such as multimodality and skewness. The basic method makes use of sequences of importance weighted Expectation Maximization steps in order to efficiently construct a mixture...

We analyze the famous Wolf’s sunspot numbers. We discovered that the distribution of the sunspot number fluctuations is a mixture of the BHP distribution with the Gaussian distribution.

Mixture of Experts (MoE) is a popular framework in the fields of statistics and machine learning for modeling heterogeneity in data for regression, classification and clustering. MoE for continuous data are usually based on the normal distribution. However, it is known that for data with asymmetric behavior, heavy tails and atypical observations, the use of the normal distribution is unsuitable...

In task switching, increasing the response-cue interval has been shown to reduce the switch cost. This has been attributed to a time-based decay process influencing the activation of memory representations of tasks (task-sets). Recently, an alternative account based on interference rather than decay has been successfully applied to this data (Horoufchin et al., 2011a). In this account, variatio...

Mixture of Student t-distribution (MoT) has been widely used to model multivariate data sets with atypical observations, or outliers for robust clustering. In this paper, we developed a novel robust clustering approach by modeling the data sets with mixture of Pearson type VII distribution (MoP). An EM algorithm is developed for the maximum likelihood estimation of the model parameters. Outlier...

In this paper, we study the fluctuations of sums of random variables with distribution defined as a mixture of light-tail and truncated heavy-tail distributions. We focus on the case when both the mixing coefficient and the truncation level depend on the number of summands. The aim of this research is to characterize the limiting distributions of the sums due to various relations between these ...

A new method for analyzing high-dimensional categorical data, Linear Latent Structure (LLS) analysis, is presented. LLS models belong to the family of latent structure models, which are mixture distribution models constrained to satisfy the local independence assumption. LLS analysis explicitly considers a family of mixed distributions as a linear space and LLS models are obtained by imposing l...