Minimum Hellinger Distance Estimation and Minimum Density Power Divergence Estimation in Estimating Mixture Proportions

Basu et al. (1998) proposed a new density-based estimator, called the minimum density power divergence estimator (MDPDE), which avoid the use of nonparametric density estimation and associated complication such as bandwidth selection. Woodward et al. (1995) examined the minimum Hellinger distance estimator (MHDE), proposed by Beran (1977), in the case of estimation of the mixture proportion in the mixture of two normals. In this article, we introduce the MDPDE for a mixture proportion, and show that both the MDPDE and the MHDE have the same asymptotic distribution at a model. Simulation study identifies some cases where the MHDE is consistently better than the MDPDE in terms of bias.