Abstract
The class of location-scale finite mixtures is of enduring interest both from applied and theoretical perspectives of probability and statistics. We establish and prove the following results: to an arbitrary degree of accuracy, (a) location-scale mixtures of a continuous probability density function (PDF) can approximate any continuous PDF, uniformly, on a compact set; and (b) for any finite , location-scale mixtures of an essentially bounded PDF can approximate any PDF in , in the norm.
1Normandie Univ, UNICAEN, CNRS, LMNO, 14000 Caen, France.
2School of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences. Department of Mathematics and Statistics, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
3School of Mathematics and Physics, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Brisbane, Australia.
∗∗Corresponding author.
Keywords: Mixture models, approximation theory, uniform approximation, probability density functions.
1 Introduction
Define to be a normed vector space (NVS), and let , for some , where is the Euclidean norm. Let be a function satisfying and , where is the Lebesgue measure. We say that is a probability density function (PDF) on the domain (which we will omit for brevity, from hereon in). Let be another PDF and define the functional class , where
, ,
, and is the matrix transposition operator. We say that is an location-scale finite mixture of the PDF . The class has enjoyed enduring practical and theoretical interest throughout the years, as reported in the volumes of Everitt and Hand, (1981), McLachlan and Basford, (1988), Lindsay, (1995), McLachlan and Peel, (2000), Frühwirth-Schnatter, (2006), Mengersen et al., (2011), Frühwirth-Schnatter et al., (2019), and Nguyen et al., (2021).
We say that is compactly supported on , if is compact and if where is the indicator function that takes value 1 when , and elsewhere, and where is the set complement operator (i.e. ). Here, is a generic subset of . Further, say that for any , if
and say that , the class of essentially bounded measurable functions, if
where we call the on . Denote the class of all bounded functions on by
and write
For brevity, we shall write , , , and .
Lastly, we denote the class of continuous functions and uniformly continuous functions by and , respectively. The classes of bounded continuous function shall be denoted by . Note that the class of continuous functions that vanish at infinity, defined as
is a subset of .
An important characteristic of the class is its capability of approximating larger classes of PDFs in various ways. Motivated by the incomplete proofs of Xu et al., (1993, Lem 3.1) and Theorem 5 from Cheney and Light, (2000, Chapter 20), as well as the results of Nestoridis and Stefanopoulos, (2007), Bacharoglou, (2010), and Nestoridis et al., (2011), Nguyen et al., (2020) established and proved the following theorem regarding sequences of PDFs from .
Theorem 1 (Theorem 5 from Nguyen et al., (2020)).
Let denote an location finite mixture PDF. If we assume that and are PDFs and that , then the following statements are true.
-
(a)
For any , there exists a sequence , such that
-
(b)
For any , and compact set , there exists a sequence , such that
-
(c)
For any and , there exists a sequence , such that
-
(d)
For any measurable , there exists a sequence , such that
-
(e)
If is a Borel measure on , then for any , there exists a sequence , such that
Further, if we assume that
then the following is also true.
-
(f)
For any , there exists a sequence , such that
The goal of this work is to seek the weakest set of assumptions in order to establish approximation theoretical results over the widest class of probability density problems, possible. In this paper, we establish Theorem 2 which improves upon Theorem 1 in a number of ways. More specifically, while statements (a), (c), (d), and (e) still hold under the same assumptions as in Theorem 1; statement (b) from Theorem 1 is improved to apply to a larger class of target function , see more in statement (a) of Theorem 2; and statement (f) from Theorem 1 is drastically improved to apply to any and , see more in statement (b) of Theorem 2. We note in particular that our improvement with respect to statement (b) from Theorem 1 yields exactly the result of Theorem 5 from Cheney and Light, (2000, Chapter 20), which was incorrectly proved (see also DasGupta, (2008, Theorem 33.2)).
The remainder of the article progresses as follows. The main result of this paper is stated in Section 2. Technical preliminaries to the proof of the main result are presented in Section 3. The proof is then established in Section 4. Additional technical results required throughout the paper are reported in the Appendix A.
2 Main result
Theorem 2.
Let denote an location finite mixture PDF. If we assume that and are PDFs, then the following statements are true.
-
(a)
If and is a compact set, then there exists a sequence , such that
-
(b)
For , if and , then there exists a sequence , such that
3 Technical preliminaries
Let , and denote the convolution of and by . Further, we say that () is a dilate of .
Notice that can be parameterized via dilates. That is, we can write
where .
Let be a subset of , and denote the convex hull of by is the smallest convex subset in that contains (cf. Brezis, , 2010, Chapter 1). By definition, we may write
where .
Define the class of “basic” densities, which will serve as the approximation building blocks, as follows
and suppose that we can choose a suitable NVS , such that . Then, by definition, it holds that is a convex hull of .
For and , we define the open and closed balls of radius , centered around , by:
and
respectively. For brevity, we also write and . A set is open, if for every , there exists an , such that . We say that is closed if its complement is open, and by definition, we say that and the empty set are both closed and open.
We call the smallest closed set containing its closure, and we denote it by . A sequence converges to , if , and we denote it symbolically by . That is, for every , there exists an , such that implies that .
By Lemma 6, we can write the closure of as
and hence
Thus, by definition, it holds that is a closed and convex subset of .
If is a PDF on , we denote its support by
and furthermore, we denote the set of compactly supported continuous functions by
For open sets , we will write as shorthand for , , and .
The following lemmas permit us to prove the primary technical mechanism that is used to prove our main result presented in Theorem 2.
Lemma 1.
Let be a PDF. Then, for every compact , we can choose , such that , , and on , for some .
Proof.
Lemma 2.
Let , such that , , and , and let be a PDF. Then, for any , there exists a sequence , so that
| (1) |
Furthermore, if , we have the stronger result that
| (2) |
Proof.
It suffices to show that given any , there exists a sufficiently large such that for all , there exists a satisfying
| (3) |
First, write
where is a continuous image of a compact set, and hence is also compact (cf. Rudin, , 1976, Theorem 4.14). By Lemma 11, for any , there exist (, for some ), such that . Further, if , then . We can hence obtain a disjoint covering of by taking , and () (cf. Cheney and Light, , 2000, Chapter 24). Notice that , each is a Borel set, and , by construction.
We shall denote the disjoint cover of by . We seek to show that there exists an and , such that
where , , and , for . We then set and . Here, depends only on and . Suppose that . Then, since , there exists some such that . We can choose
so that and
Moreover, if we assume that , then there exists a constant such that . In this case, we can choose to obtain
Since and , the sum satisfies the inequalities:
Thus, , and our construction of implies that .
We can then bound the left-hand side of (3) as follows:
| (4) |
Since , , and , it holds that and
Note that , and thus is uniformly continuous on the compact set , implying that
for each , where
denotes a modulus of continuity. Since (cf. Makarov and Podkorytov, , 2013, Theorem 4.7.3), we may choose a , such that
We then proceed from (4) as follows:
| (5) |
To conclude the proof of (1), it suffices to choose an appropriate sequence of partitions , such that , for some sufficiently large , so that (4) and (5) hold. This is possible via Lemma 11. When , we notice that (4) and (5) both hold for all . Thus, we have the stronger result of (2). ∎
We present the primary tools for proving Theorem (2) in the following pair of lemma. The first one in Lemma 3 permits the approximation of convolutions of the form in the functional space, and the second presented in Lemma 4 generalizes this first result to the spaces , where , under an essentially bounded assumption.
Lemma 3.
If and are PDFs in the NVS , then and , for every . Furthermore, there exists a sequence , such that
Proof.
For any , we can show that , since
If , then , since it is a finite sum of functions in , and thus, . Note that since is a PDF, we have , and by Lemma 13, we also have that . By Lemma 14, it then follows that
By definition of of the closure of in , it suffices to show that for any , . We seek a contradiction by assuming that . Then, we can choose and so that are nonempty convex subsets, such that . Furthermore, is closed and is compact. By Lemma 7, there exists a continuous linear functional , such that , for all and . By definition of , for all we have
Lemma 4.
If are PDFs in the NVS , for , then, and , for any . Furthermore, there exists a sequence , such that
Proof.
We obtain the result for via Lemma 3. Otherwise, since , we know that and , for each , via Lemma 12. For any , we then have via finite summation, and hence . Since , Lemma 13 implies that . By definition of the closure of it suffices to show that , for any . This can be achieved by seeking a contradiction under the assumption that and using Lemma 8 in the same manner as Lemma 9 is used in the proof of Lemma 3. ∎
4 Proof of main result
4.1 Proof of Theorem 2 (a)
To prove the statement (a) of Theorem 2, it suffices to show that there exists a sufficiently large , such that for all , there exists a , such that , for any and compact set .
First, Lemma 1 implies that we can choose a , such that , , and on , for some , where . We then have .
Since , Lemma 5 and Corollary 1 then imply that there exists a , such that for all , . We shall assume that , from hereon in.
Lemma 2 then implies that there exists an , such that for any , there exists a , such that . The triangle inequality then completes the proof.
4.2 Proof of Theorem 2 (b)
To prove the statement (a) of Theorem 2, it suffices to show that there exists a sufficiently large , such that for all , there exists a , such that , for any .
Appendix A Technical results
We state a number of technical results that are used throughout the main text, in this Appendix. Sources for unproved results are provided at the end of the section.
Lemma 5.
Let be a sequence of PDFs in , such that for every ,
Then, for and ,
Furthermore, for and compact ,
The sequences of Lemma 5 are often referred to as approximate identities or approximations of identity (cf. Makarov and Podkorytov, , 2013, Sec. 7.6). A typical construction of approximate identities is to consider the sequence of dilations, of the form: , which permits the following corollary.
Corollary 1.
Let be a PDF. Then, the sequence satisfies the hypothesis of Lemma 5 and hence permits its conclusion.
Lemma 6.
Let be an NVS, and let and . Then the following statements are equivalent: (a) ; (b) , for all ; and (c) there exists a sequence that converges to .
Let be a locally convex linear topological space over and recall that a functional is a function defined on (or some subspace of ), with values in . We denote the due space of (the space of all continuous linear functions on ) by .
Lemma 7 (Second geometric form of the Hahn-Banach theorem).
Let be two nonempty convex subsets, such that . Assume that is closed and that is compact. Then, there exists a continuous linear functional , such that its corresponding hyperplane () strictly separates and . That is, there exists some , such that and , for all and . Or, in other words, .
Lemma 8 (Riesz representation theorem for , ).
If , and , then, there exists a unique function , such that for all ,
where .
Lemma 9 (Riesz representation theorem for ).
If , then there exists a unique , such that for all ,
Lemma 10.
Let be open subsets of , and let be a compact set, such that . Then, there exists functions (), such that , for all . The set is referred to as the partition of unity on , subordinated to the cover .
Lemma 11.
If is bounded, then for any , can be covered by , for some finite , where and .
Lemma 12.
If , then .
Lemma 13.
If () and , then exists and we have . Furthermore, if and are such that , then and , then exists, is bounded and uniformly continuous, and . In particular, if , then .
Lemma 14 (Fubini’s Theorem).
Let and be measure spaces, and assume that is a function on . If
then
Sources for results
Lemma 5 appears in Makarov and Podkorytov, (2013, Thm. 9.3.3) and Cheney and Light, (2000, Ch. 20, Thm. 2). Corollary 1 is obtained from Cheney and Light, (2000, Ch. 20, Thm. 4). Lemmas 6, 12, and 13 are taken from Propositions 0.22, 6.10, and 8.8 Folland, (1999). Lemmas 7–9 appear in Brezis, (2010) as Theorems 1.7, 4.11, and 4.14, respectively. Lemmas 10 and 14 can be found in Rudin, (1987) as Theorems 2.13 and Theorem 8.8, respectively. Lemma 11 is obtained from Conway, (2012, Thm. 1.2.2).
Appendix B Acknowledgements
The authors would like to very much thank Pr. Eric Ricard for the interesting discussions with him and for his suggestions. TTN is supported by “Contrat doctoral” from the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research and by the French National Research Agency (ANR) grant SMILES ANR-18-CE40-0014. HDN and GJM are funded by Australian Research Council grant number DP180101192.
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