Hi, I am trying to understand how the functions em() and me() from the mclust package work. I cannot make sense of what the algorithm returns. Here is a basic, simple example: ######################################### # two bivariate normals, centered at (-5,0) and (5,0), with Id covariance x1 = cbind(rep(-5, 100), rep(0, 100)) + matrix(rnorm(100*2), 100, 2) x2 = cbind(rep(5, 100), rep(0, 100)) + matrix(rnorm(100*2), 100, 2) x = rbind(x1,x2) plot(x[,1],x[,2]) library(mclust) # start with equal chance of belonging to any of the two classes out = me(modelName = 'EEE', data = x, z = 1/2*matrix(rep(1,200*2), 200, 2)) out$parameters # the algorithm does not recover the actual parameters! ######################################### In particular, each time the algorithm returns the same mean for both populations! I also tried the em() function with an initialization given by mstep (), just as in the example in help(em). Please let me know. Thanks. Ery Arias-Castro [[alternative HTML version deleted]]