Abstract In this paper, we propose a Bayesian inference method for the generalized Gamma mixture model (GΓMM) based on variational expectation-maximization algorithm. Specifically, the shape parameters, the inverse scale parameters, and the mixing coefficients in the GΓMM are treated as random variables, while the power parameters are left as parameters without assigning prior distributions. The help function is designed to approximate the lower bound of the variational objective function, which facilitates the assignment of the conjugate prior distributions and leads to the closed-form update equations. On this basis, the variational E-step and the variational M-step are alternatively implemented to infer the posteriors of the variables and estimate the parameters. The computational demand is reduced by the proposed method. More importantly, the effective number of components of the GΓMM can be determined automatically. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method especially in modeling the asymmetric and heavy-tailed data.