Title: Reconstructing the Galactic halo's accretion history: A finite mixture model approach" Abstract: The stellar halo that surrounds our Milky Way Galaxy is thought to have been built, at least in part, from the agglomeration of stars from many smaller galaxies. This talk outlines an approach to reconstructing the history of Galactic accretion events by looking at the distribution of the chemical abundances of halo stars. The full distribution is assumed to result from the superpositionof stellar populations accreted at different times from progenitor galaxies of different sizes. Our approach uses the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to find the maximum-likelihood estimators that assess the contribution of each of these progenitors in forming the Galaxy. Please note: This is a joint presentation with Will Jessop (Stats)