Identifying Subpopulations of a Hierarchical Structured Data using a Semi-Supervised Mixture Modeling Approach
Abstract
The field of forensic statistics offers a unique hierarchical data structure in which a population is composed of several subpopulations of sources and a sample is collected from each source. This subpopulation structure creates a hierarchical layer. We propose using a semi-supervised mixture modeling approach to model the subpopulation structure which leverages the fact that we know the collection of samples came from the same, yet unknown, source. A simulation study based on a famous glass data was conducted and shows this method performs better than other unsupervised approaches which have been previously used in practice.
Identifying Subpopulations of a Hierarchical Structured Data using a Semi-Supervised Mixture Modeling Approach
Volstorff A
The field of forensic statistics offers a unique hierarchical data structure in which a population is composed of several subpopulations of sources and a sample is collected from each source. This subpopulation structure creates a hierarchical layer. We propose using a semi-supervised mixture modeling approach to model the subpopulation structure which leverages the fact that we know the collection of samples came from the same, yet unknown, source. A simulation study based on a famous glass data was conducted and shows this method performs better than other unsupervised approaches which have been previously used in practice.