Title: Special issue on “Innovations on model based clustering and classification”
Abstract: This is the fourth Special Issue of ADAC dedicated to recent developments in Model-Based Clustering and Classification, an area which provides increasingly active research in both theoretical and applied domains.The Call for Papers for this special issue resulted in 46 manuscript submissions, among which 10 have been accepted for publication after a blinded peer-reviewing process.This Special Issue contains papers dealing with quite different topics.The first three papers focus on the area of mixtures of regressions from different perspectives.The three following papers deal with mixture models for robust model-based clustering, data modeling with multiple partial right censoring points, and modeling under measurement inconsistency, respectively.The next two papers belong to the area of mixtures of skewed distributions.Two final papers concern particle Monte Carlo methods and stochastic block models.Below, we provide a short overview on the papers published in this special issue.The paper "Seemingly unrelated clusterwise linear regression" by Giuliano Galimberti and Gabriele Soffritti presents a flexible class of finite mixtures of multivariate Gaussian linear regression models in which different vectors of predictors can be used for the dependent variables.The model is fit to data according to the maximum likelihood approach and some parsimonious model are introduced too.One of the main contributions of the paper consists in providing conditions for model identifiability and in the analysis of the consistency of the maximum likelihood estimator under the proposed class of models.In this framework, theoretical results and simulation studies of the behavior of the ML estimator under different scenarios are provided, considering both different sample sizes and overlap levels among regression models.The model is also illustrated by an application to real data.The next paper by Sijia Xiang and Weixin Yao entitled "Semiparametric mixtures of regressions with single-index for Model Based Clustering" proposes two finite