Non-standard boundary behaviour in two-component mixture models

TL;DR

This paper explores the unusual large-sample behavior of maximum likelihood estimators at the boundary points in two-component mixture models, revealing asymmetries and inferential anomalies driven by tail properties.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of boundary behavior in mixture models, including new limit theorems and insights into the impact of tail behavior on inference.

Findings

Asymmetry in boundary estimator behavior at 0 and 1.

New limit theorem for joint distribution of maximum and mean.

Conditional likelihood ratio distribution differs from classical chi-square.

Abstract

Consider a binary mixture model of the form $F_\theta = (1-\theta)F_0 + \theta F_1$, where $F_0$ is standard Gaussian and $F_1$ is a completely specified heavy-tailed distribution with the same support. For a sample of $n$ independent and identically distributed values $X_i \sim F_\theta$, the maximum likelihood estimator $\hat\theta_n$ is asymptotically normal provided that $0 < \theta < 1$ is an interior point. This paper investigates the large-sample behaviour for boundary points, which is entirely different and strikingly asymmetric for $\theta=0$ and $\theta=1$. The reason for the asymmetry has to do with typical choices such that $F_0$ is an extreme boundary point and $F_1$ is usually not extreme. On the right boundary, well known results on boundary parameter problems are recovered, giving $\lim \mathbb{P}_1(\hat\theta_n < 1)=1/2$. On the left boundary, $\lim\mathbb{P}_0(\hat\theta_n > 0)=1-1/\alpha$, where $1\leq \alpha \leq 2$ indexes the domain of attraction of the density ratio $f_1(X)/f_0(X)$ when $X\sim F_0$. For $\alpha=1$, which is the most important case in practice, we show how the tail behaviour of $F_1$ governs the rate at which $\mathbb{P}_0(\hat\theta_n > 0)$ tends to zero. A new limit theorem for the joint distribution of the sample maximum and sample mean conditional on positivity establishes multiple inferential anomalies. Most notably, given $\hat\theta_n > 0$, the likelihood ratio statistic has a conditional null limit distribution $G\neq\chi^2_1$ determined by the joint limit theorem. We show through this route that no advantage is gained by extending the single distribution $F_1$ to the nonparametric composite mixture generated by the same tail-equivalence class.