Communications in Statistics-Simulation and Computation

We present a method for fitting parametric probability density models using an integrated square error criterion on a continuum of weighted Lebesgue spaces formed by ultraspherical polynomials. This approach is inherently suitable for creating mixture model representations of complex distributions and allows fully autonomous cluster analysis of high-dimensional data sets. The method is also suitable for extremely large sets, allowing post factomodel selection and analysis even in the absence of the original data. Furthermore, the fitting procedure only requires the parametric model to be pointwise evaluable, making it trivial to fit user-defined models through a generic algorithm.