A simulation method based on importance sampling, Gibbs and Metropolis-Hastings techniques allows to approximate the ratio between the likelihhod function computed for two different parameter values. Thus it is possible to approximate the maximum likelihood estimator in the general framework of...

We propose in this paper a Bayesian approach with a noninformative prior distribution developed in Mengersen and Robert (1996) and Robert and Titterington (1996) in the setup of mixtures of distributions and hidden Markov models, respectively.