Paper detail

Stochastic Approximation Algorithm for Estimating Mixing Distribution for Dependent Observations

Estimating the mixing density of a mixture distribution remains an interesting problem in statistics literature. Using a stochastic approximation method, Newton and Zhang (1999) introduced a fast recursive algorithm for estimating the mixing density of a mixture. Under suitably chosen weights the stochastic approximation estimator converges to the true solution. In Tokdar et. al. (2009) the consistency of this recursive estimation method was established. However, the proof of consistency of the resulting estimator used independence among observations as an assumption. Here, we extend the investigation of performance of Newton's algorithm to several dependent scenarios. We prove that the original algorithm under certain conditions remains consistent even when the observations are arising from a weakly dependent stationary process with the target mixture as the marginal density. We show consistency under a decay condition on the dependence among observations when the dependence is characterized by a quantity similar to mutual information between the observations.