Semiparametric mixture of experts with unspecified gate network

The traditional mixture of experts (ME) modeled the gate network using a certain parametric function. However, if the assumed parametric function does not properly reflect the true nature, the prediction strength of ME would become weak. For example, the parametric ME often uses logistic or multinomial logistic models for the network model. However, this could be very misleading if the true nature of the data is quite different from those models. Although, in this case, we may develop more flexible parametric models by extending the model at hand, we will never be free from such misspecification problems. In order to alleviate such weakness of the parametric ME, we propose to use the semi-parametric mixture of experts (SME) in which the gate network is estimated in a non-parametrical way. Based on this, we compared the performance of the SME with those of ME and neural networks via several simulation experiments and real data examples.