A comparison between the simulated annealing and the EM algorithms in normal mixture decompositions

We compare the performances of the simulated annealing and the EM algorithms in problems of decomposition of normal mixtures according to the likelihood approach. In this case the likelihood function has multiple maxima and singularities, and we consider a suitable reformulation of the problem which yields an optimization problem having a global solution and at least a smaller number of spurious maxima. The results are compared considering some distance measures between the estimated distributions and the true ones. No overwhelming superiority of either method has been demonstrated, though in one of our cases simulated annealing achieved better results.