Constrained monotone EM algorithms for finite mixture of multivariate Gaussians

The likelihood function for normal multivariate mixtures may present both local spurious maxima and also singularities and the latter may cause the failure of the optimization algorithms. Theoretical results assure that imposing some constraints on the eigenvalues of the covariance matrices of the multivariate normal components leads to a constrained parameter space with no singularities and at least a smaller number of local maxima of the likelihood function. Conditions assuring that an EM algorithm implementing such constraints maintains the monotonicity property of the usual EM algorithm are provided. Different approaches are presented and their performances are evaluated and compared using numerical experiments. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.