Prerelease demand forecasting is one of the most crucial yet difficult tasks facing marketers in the $60 billion motion picture industry. We propose functional shape analysis (FSA) of virtual stock markets (VSMs) to address this long-standing challenge. In VSMs, prices of a movie's stock reflect...

The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a very popular optimization tool for mixture problems and in particular for model-based clustering problems. However, while the algorithm is convenient to implement and numerically very stable, it only produces local solutions. Thus, it may not...