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

mmiller at mail.usp.edu mmiller at mail.usp.edu
Mon Feb 18 17:03:10 CET 2008


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



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