| The EM algorithm was explained and given its name in a classic 1977 paper by Arthur Dempster, Nan Laird, and Donald Rubin. They pointed out that the method had been "proposed many times in special circumstances" by earlier authors. One of the earliest is the gene-counting method for estimating allele frequencies by Cedric Smith. A very detailed treatment of the EM method for exponential families was published by Rolf Sundberg in his thesis and several papers following his collaboration with Per Martin-Löf and Anders Martin-Löf.<!-- * Martin-Löf, P. "Exact tests, confidence regions and estimates", with a discussion by A. W. F. Edwards, G. A. Barnard, D. A. Sprott, O. Barndorff-Nielsen, D. Basu and G. Rasch. Proceedings of Conference on Foundational Questions in Statistical Inference (Aarhus, 1973), pp. 121–138. Memoirs, No. 1, Dept. Theoret. Statist., Inst. Math., Univ. Aarhus, Aarhus, 1974. --> The Dempster–Laird–Rubin paper in 1977 generalized the method and sketched a convergence analysis for a wider class of problems. The Dempster–Laird–Rubin paper established the EM method as an important tool of statistical analysis. | | The EM algorithm was explained and given its name in a classic 1977 paper by Arthur Dempster, Nan Laird, and Donald Rubin. They pointed out that the method had been "proposed many times in special circumstances" by earlier authors. One of the earliest is the gene-counting method for estimating allele frequencies by Cedric Smith. A very detailed treatment of the EM method for exponential families was published by Rolf Sundberg in his thesis and several papers following his collaboration with Per Martin-Löf and Anders Martin-Löf.<!-- * Martin-Löf, P. "Exact tests, confidence regions and estimates", with a discussion by A. W. F. Edwards, G. A. Barnard, D. A. Sprott, O. Barndorff-Nielsen, D. Basu and G. Rasch. Proceedings of Conference on Foundational Questions in Statistical Inference (Aarhus, 1973), pp. 121–138. Memoirs, No. 1, Dept. Theoret. Statist., Inst. Math., Univ. Aarhus, Aarhus, 1974. --> The Dempster–Laird–Rubin paper in 1977 generalized the method and sketched a convergence analysis for a wider class of problems. The Dempster–Laird–Rubin paper established the EM method as an important tool of statistical analysis. |