Least squares mixture decomposition estimation

The Least Squares Mixture Decomposition Estimator (LSMDE) is a new nonparametric density estimation technique developed by modifying the ordinary kernel density estimators. While the ordinary kernel density estimator assumes equal weight (l/n) for each data point, LSMDE assigns the optimized weight to each data point via the quadratic programming under the Mean Integrated Squared Error (MISE) criterion. As results, we find out that the optimized weights for a given data set are far different from l/n for a reasonable smoothing parameter and, furthermore, many data points are assigned to zero weights after the optimization. This implies that LSMDE decomposes the underlying density function to a finite mixture distribution of p (< n) kernel functions. LSMDE turns out to be more informative, especially in multi-dimensional cases when the visualization of the density function is difficult, than the ordinary kernel density estimator by suggesting the underlying structure of a given data set.