• Communications for Statistical Applications and Methods
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.135-145
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• 2012

It is well known that the maximum likelihood estimator(MLE) in normal mixture models with unequal variances does not fall in the interior of the parameter space. Recently, a doubly smoothed maximum likelihood estimator(DS-MLE) (Seo and Lindsay, 2010) was proposed as a general alternative to the ordinary maximum likelihood estimator. Although this method gives a natural modification to the ordinary MLE, its computation is cumbersome due to intractable integrations. In this paper, we derive an EM algorithm for the DS-MLE under normal mixture models and propose a fast computational tool using a local quadratic approximation. The accuracy and speed of the proposed method is then presented via some numerical studies.