Abstract

This paper algorithmically and empirically studies two major types of nonparametric multivariate density estimation techniques, where no assumption is made about the data being drawn from any of known parametric families of distribution. The first type is the popular kernel method (and several of its variants) which uses locally tuned radial basis (e.g., Gaussian) functions to interpolate the multi-dimensional density; the second type is based on an exploratory projection pursuit technique which interprets the multi-dimensional density through the construction of several one-dimensional densities along highly "interesting" projections of multidimensional data. Performance evaluations using training data from mixture Gaussian and mixture Cauchy densities are presented. The results show that the curse of dimensionality and the sensitivity of control parameters have a much more adverse impact on the kernel density estimators than on the projection pursuit density estimators. 3 This rese...

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