Representative Points from a Mixture of Two Normal Distributions

Abstract

In recent years, the mixture of two-component normal distributions (MixN) has attracted considerable interest due to its flexibility in capturing a variety of density shapes. In this paper, we investigate the problem of discretizing a MixN by a fixed number of points under the minimum mean squared error (MSE-RPs). Motivated by the Fang-He algorithm, we provide an effective computational procedure with high precision for generating numerical approximations of MSE-RPs from a MixN. We have explored the properties of the nonlinear system used to generate MSE-RPs and demonstrated the convergence of the procedure. In numerical studies, the proposed computation procedure is compared with the k-means algorithm. From an application perspective, MSE-RPs have potential advantages in statistical inference.Our numerical studies show that MSE-RPs can significantly improve Kernel density estimation.