Robust mixture modelling using sub-Gaussian stable distribution

Abstract

Heavy-tailed distributions are widely used in robust mixture modelling due to possessing thick tails. As a computationally tractable subclass of the stable distributions, sub-Gaussian $\alpha$-stable distribution received much interest in the literature. Here, we introduce a type of expectation maximization algorithm that estimates parameters of a mixture of sub-Gaussian stable distributions. A comparative study, in the presence of some well-known mixture models, is performed to show the robustness and performance of the mixture of sub-Gaussian $\alpha$-stable distributions for modelling, simulated, synthetic, and real data.