f7e6c85504ce6e82442c770f7c8606f0-Reviews.html

The title of this paper is much like the paper itself: to-the-point, descriptive, and readable. "A simple example of Dirichlet process mixture inconsistency for the number of components" delivers on its promise by providing two easy-to-understand demonstrations of the severity of the problem of using Dirichlet process mixtures to estimate the number of components in a mixture model. The authors start by demonstrating that making such a component-cardinality estimate is widespread in the literature (and therefore a problem deserving of interest), briefly describe the Dirichlet process mixture (DPM) model (with particular emphasis on the popular normal likelihood case), and then demonstrate with a simple single-component mixture example how poorly estimation of component cardinality can go (their convincing answer: very poorly). Not only was the paper enjoyable to read but, refreshingly, didn't try to fit 20 pages of material into an 8 page limit. One potential criticism of this paper is that this result should be well-known in some sense in the community.