Misturas finitas de normais assimétricas e de t assimétricas aplicadas em análise discriminante

Abstract

We investigated use of finite mixture models with skew normal independent distributions to model the conditional distributions in discriminat analysis, particularly the skew normal and skew t. To evaluate this model, we developed a simulation study and applications with real data sets, analyzing error rates associated with the classifiers obtained with these mixture models. Problems were simulated with different structures and separations for the classes distributions employing different training set sizes. The results of the study suggest that the models evaluated are able to adjust to different problems studied, from the simplest to the most complex in terms of modeling the observations for classification purposes. With real data, where then shapes distributions of the class is unknown, the models showed reasonable error rates when compared to other classifiers. As a limitation for the analized sets of data was observed that modeling by finite mixtures requires large samples per class when the dimension of the feature vector is relatively high.