English

Mixture Proportion Estimation Beyond Irreducibility

Machine Learning 2023-08-01 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

The task of mixture proportion estimation (MPE) is to estimate the weight of a component distribution in a mixture, given observations from both the component and mixture. Previous work on MPE adopts the irreducibility assumption, which ensures identifiablity of the mixture proportion. In this paper, we propose a more general sufficient condition that accommodates several settings of interest where irreducibility does not hold. We further present a resampling-based meta-algorithm that takes any existing MPE algorithm designed to work under irreducibility and adapts it to work under our more general condition. Our approach empirically exhibits improved estimation performance relative to baseline methods and to a recently proposed regrouping-based algorithm.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2306.01253,
  title  = {Mixture Proportion Estimation Beyond Irreducibility},
  author = {Yilun Zhu and Aaron Fjeldsted and Darren Holland and George Landon and Azaree Lintereur and Clayton Scott},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.01253},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:54:11.080Z