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A new sufficient condition for identifiability of countably infinite mixtures

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Abstract

While identifiability of finite mixtures for a wide range of distributions has been studied by statisticians for decades, discussion on countably infinite mixtures is still limited. This article provides an sufficient condition by means of well-ordered sets and uniform convergence of series. It is then applied to revisit some examples for which the identifiability is well established and then explore the identifiability for several distribution families, including normal, gamma, Cauchy, noncentral \(\chi ^2\), multivariate normal distributions.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are greatly grateful to an Associate Editor and a referee for their considerably helpful comments and suggestions, which eminently improve this essay. This research is partially supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 71071056 and the Philosophy and Social Science Foundation of Shanghai under grant No. 2010BJB004.

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Correspondence to Lei Yang.

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Yang, L., Wu, X. A new sufficient condition for identifiability of countably infinite mixtures. Metrika 77, 377–387 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00184-013-0444-x

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