Editorial:: recent developments in mixture models

Recent developments in the area of mixture models are introduced, reviewed and discussed. The paper introduces this special issue on mixture models, which touches upon a diversity of developments which were the topic of a recent conference on mixture models, taken place in Hamburg, July 2001. These developments include issues in nonparametric maximum likelihood theory, the number of components problem, the non-standard distribution of the likelihood ratio for mixture models, computational issues connected with the EM algorithm, several special mixture models and application studies. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.