Applications in Industry

This chapter describes the middle ground and include activities that have a commercial focus. It shows the wide diversity of applications of mixture models to problems in industry, and the potential advantages of these approaches, through a series of case studies. The chapter focuses on the iconic and pervasive need for process monitoring, and reviews a range of mixture approaches that have been proposed to tackle complex multimodal and dynamic or online processes. It also focuses on mixture approaches to resource allocation, applied here in a spatial health context but applicable more generally. The chapter provides a more detailed description of a multivariate Gaussian mixture approach to a biosecurity risk assessment problem, using big data in the form of satellite imagery. It argues that a detailed description of a mixture model, this time using a nonparametric formulation, for assessing an industrial impact, notably the influence of a toxic spill on soil biodiversity.