Principal component analysis (PCA) is a well established technique for data analysis and processing. Recently, it has been shown that the principal axes of a set of observed data vectors might be determined trough maximum likelihood estimation of parameter in a specific form of latent variable...

Multivariate random sums appear in many scientific fields, most notably in actuarial science, where they model both the number of claims and their sizes. Unfortunately, they pose severe inferential problems. For example, their density function is analytically intractable, in the general case,...