Bias in parameter estimates can be substantial when heteroscedastic normal mixtures are misspecified as homoscedastic normal mixtures, and vice versa. We show through simulations that the maximum likelihood estimators under the false assumption of equal variances are inconsistent and bias in...

Determining the number of components in a mixture distribution is of interest to researchers in many areas. In this paper, we investigate the statistical properties of a likelihood ratio test proposed by Lo et al. (Biometrika 88 (2001) 767) for determining the number of components in a normal...