[R] newbie (me) needs to model distribution as two overlapping gaussians

[tcornulier]

Is a finite mixture of 2 gaussians the name you are looking for?
This specific model will not deal with your N component however.

you can find some functions here:
http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/Cluster.html

Thomas

mmiller at mail.usp.edu wrote:
> Recently, I have been working with some data that look like two overlapping gaussian distributions.  I would like to either
> 
> 1) determine the mean and SD for each of the two distributions
> 
> OR
> 
> 2) get some (bayesian ?) statistic that estimates how likely an observation is to belong to the left-hand or right-hand distribution
> 
> In case I'm using the wrong language, my data looks something like this:
> 
> B <- rnorm(500,40,10)
> H <- rnorm(500,80,5 )
> N <- runif(200,0,99)
> D <- c(B,H,N)
> 
> Where B=background, H=hits, N=noise, and D=my observed distribution
> 
> I have seen analyses like this in the past, but I can't remember what it is called.  If somebody out there can point me towards an R function, or even the cannonical name for this kind of model, I think I can write the necessary code.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Mark
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> 

-- 


**************************
Thomas Cornulier

Mammal Research Institute
Polish Academy of Sciences
ul. Waszkiewicza 1c
17-230 Bialowieza
http://www.zbs.bialowieza.pl/?en

tel (0048) 85 682 77 88