Open Research Online Oro.Open.Ac.Uk

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Open Research Online Oro.Open.Ac.Uk Open Research Online The Open University’s repository of research publications and other research outputs Some contributions to the analysis of skew data on the line and circle Thesis How to cite: Pewsey, Arthur Richard (2002). Some contributions to the analysis of skew data on the line and circle. PhD thesis The Open University. For guidance on citations see FAQs. c 2002 Arthur Richard Pewsey Version: Version of Record Link(s) to article on publisher’s website: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21954/ou.ro.0000fbf5 Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. oro.open.ac.uk S o m e C ontributions t o t h e A n a l y s is o f S k e w D a t a o n t h e L in e a n d Cir c l e by Arthur Richard Pewsey b s c , m sc Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy D epartm ent of S tatistics F aculty of M athematics and S tatistics T he O p e n U n iversity O c t o b e r 2oo2 of" SOBA^SSX^A/'. 9 2,OOZ, b a re oF ^ ProQuest Number: C811633 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely ev e n t that the author did not send a co m p le te manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest C811633 Published by ProQuest LLO (2019). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C o d e Microform Edition © ProQuest LLO. ProQuest LLO. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.Q. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 - 1346 A bstract In the first part of this thesis we consider the skew-normal class of distributions on the line and its limiting general half-normal distribution. Inferential procedures based on the methods of moments and maximum likelihood are developed and their performance assessed using simulation. Data on the strength of glass fibre and the body fat of elite athletes are used to illustrate some of the inferential issues raised. The second part of the thesis is devoted to a consideration of the analysis of skew circular data. First, we derive the large-sample distribution of certain key circular statistics and show how this result provides a basis for inference for the corresponding population measures. Next, tests for circular reflective symmetry about an unknown central direction are investigated. A large-sample test and computer intensive variants of it are developed, and their operating characteristics explored both theoretically and empirically. Subsequently, we consider tests for circular reflective symmetry about a known or specified median axis. Two new procedures are developed for testing for symmetry about a known median axis against skew alternatives, and their operating characteristics compared in a simulation experiment with those of the circular analogues of three linear tests. On the basis of the results obtained from the latter, a simple testing strategy is identified. The performance of the tests against rotation alternatives is also investigated. Throughout, the use of the various tests of symmetry is illustrated using a wide range of circular data sets. Finally, we propose the wrapped skew-normal distribution on the circle as a potential model for circular data. The distribution’s fundamental properties are presented and inference based on the methods of moments and maximum likelihood is explored. Tests for limiting cases of the class are proposed, and a potential use of the distribution is illustrated in the mixture based modelling of data on bird migration. This thesis is dedicated with great respect, gratitude and affection to P rofessor Toby L ew is Acknowledgements As I have grown older, I have become increasingly more reflective upon my past. The physical distance presently separating me from my roots only heightens the competing senses of melancholy, for what has been, and deep gratitude to those from whom I have learnt. Sadly, it is too late to express in person my gratitude to some who are most deserving of it. Nevertheless, I would like to take this opportunity to express the sincere gratitude I feel to those who have directly contributed towards my knowledge and understanding of Mathematics and Statistics, of which this thesis is an expression. Going back in time at least 25 years, two people who influenced my mathematical development greatly were my father and my ‘A’ level mathematics teacher Mr Derek Friggins. My father skillfully used evening washing up sessions to instill in me basic concepts of algebra. On deriving the theoretical results of Chapter 3, I was overcome by sensations similar to those I had felt on obtaining beautifully simple solutions to some initially horrendous problems in Applied Mathematics involving interminable trigonometric expressions. The late Mr Friggins was the person who set those problems and taught me the mathematics required to solve them. Moving on to my years as a university student in Hull, I am infinitely grateful to those who extended my mathematical knowledge and introduced me to the world of Statistics. I received my first course in Statistics from Edward Evans, and he and Michael Bingham kindled my initial interest in things statistical. In my second and third years, the stimulating lectures and tutorials given by Michael Bingham, Carolyn Craggs, Fergus Daly, Michael Goldstein, Wilfred Kendall and Toby Lewis heightened that interest still further. For the influence they had on my wider understanding of Statistics whilst a research student in Newcastle, I would like to express my gratitude to the late Jon Anderson, Robin Plackett and, especially, Peter Diggle. I would also like to thank my former colleagues Michael Bingham, Michael Goldstein and Jim Thompson, in Hull, and Ray Harris, Martin Roberts, Tony Scallan and Chris Sutton, in Preston, for their multifarious contributions to my greater knowledge and understanding of Statistics. However, this thesis is also a testament to the help and support of many other people. I am greatly indebted to Kevin McConway who, whilst Head of the Department of Statistics, saw through my application to study as a research ill student. I thank both him and his successor, Paul Garthwaite, for co-ordinating the administrative and managerial requirements of my studies. Regarding the other forms of support I have received during the research which led to the production of this thesis, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to: i) The Open University for its excellent distance learning support and on­ line library facilities. ii) Anunciacion Gutierrez, Encarna Pegado, Chris Sutton and my supervisors Chris Jones and Toby Lewis for tracking down sources in the literature. iii) Tony Scallan and David Wooff for pointers to software archives. iv) Bruno Bruderer of the Swiss Ornithological Station in Sempach, Switzerland, for providing me with the data analyzed in Chapter 6. v) Adelchi Azzalini for letting me have access to a pre-publication version of Azzalini & Capitanio (1999) and for stimulating communication by e- mail. vi) Leon Harter for his generous guidance to published work related to the general half-normal distribution. I have all sorts of reasons to be grateful to my wife, Lucia Aguilar Zuil. It was she who enticed me to Spain, a move which acted as a catalyst to renew my interest in research. She has been my emotional pillar of strength throughout. There are three people whose influence on the production of this thesis has been absolutely fundamental: Nick Fisher, Chris Jones and Toby Lewis. The original idea of wrapping the skew-normal distribution on to the circle so as to produce a model for skew circular data is due to Nick Fisher who posed it as a problem to my supervisor Toby Lewis to be cogitated over accompanied by an early morning brandy. All the other ideas expressed within the six chapters making up this thesis can, in fact, be traced back to that one original idea. So, thank you, Nick! The supervision I have received from Chris Jones has been truly excellent. Mostly our communication has been via e-mail and post, and from the experience of using these forms of communication I have been convinced of the efficacies of both and the enormous potential of conducting research “at a distance”. Rarely did I have to wait more than half an hour for a response to any e-mail sent by me. Usually within a week of posting the draft of a paper or a chapter of this thesis, I would receive an e-mail with concise and insightful feedback. The contents of my published papers and this thesis have benefitted enormously from that feedback. Thank you for all your hard work, Chris! IV I find it incredibly difficult to know where to start in expressing my gratitude to Toby Lewis. I have known Toby for nearly 25 years and during that time he has been an inspirational lecturer, friend, potential supervisor, role model, confidant, supervisor and guru to me. Always positive, always supportive, always young at heart. I feel immensely privileged that in 1978 our paths in life crossed. For all these reasons, and more, Toby, this thesis is dedicated to you. Thank you so very much.
Recommended publications
  • A Skew Extension of the T-Distribution, with Applications
    J. R. Statist. Soc. B (2003) 65, Part 1, pp. 159–174 A skew extension of the t-distribution, with applications M. C. Jones The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK and M. J. Faddy University of Birmingham, UK [Received March 2000. Final revision July 2002] Summary. A tractable skew t-distribution on the real line is proposed.This includes as a special case the symmetric t-distribution, and otherwise provides skew extensions thereof.The distribu- tion is potentially useful both for modelling data and in robustness studies. Properties of the new distribution are presented. Likelihood inference for the parameters of this skew t-distribution is developed. Application is made to two data modelling examples. Keywords: Beta distribution; Likelihood inference; Robustness; Skewness; Student’s t-distribution 1. Introduction Student’s t-distribution occurs frequently in statistics. Its usual derivation and use is as the sam- pling distribution of certain test statistics under normality, but increasingly the t-distribution is being used in both frequentist and Bayesian statistics as a heavy-tailed alternative to the nor- mal distribution when robustness to possible outliers is a concern. See Lange et al. (1989) and Gelman et al. (1995) and references therein. It will often be useful to consider a further alternative to the normal or t-distribution which is both heavy tailed and skew. To this end, we propose a family of distributions which includes the symmetric t-distributions as special cases, and also includes extensions of the t-distribution, still taking values on the whole real line, with non-zero skewness. Let a>0 and b>0be parameters.
    [Show full text]
  • A Study of Non-Central Skew T Distributions and Their Applications in Data Analysis and Change Point Detection
    A STUDY OF NON-CENTRAL SKEW T DISTRIBUTIONS AND THEIR APPLICATIONS IN DATA ANALYSIS AND CHANGE POINT DETECTION Abeer M. Hasan A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 2013 Committee: Arjun K. Gupta, Co-advisor Wei Ning, Advisor Mark Earley, Graduate Faculty Representative Junfeng Shang. Copyright c August 2013 Abeer M. Hasan All rights reserved iii ABSTRACT Arjun K. Gupta, Co-advisor Wei Ning, Advisor Over the past three decades there has been a growing interest in searching for distribution families that are suitable to analyze skewed data with excess kurtosis. The search started by numerous papers on the skew normal distribution. Multivariate t distributions started to catch attention shortly after the development of the multivariate skew normal distribution. Many researchers proposed alternative methods to generalize the univariate t distribution to the multivariate case. Recently, skew t distribution started to become popular in research. Skew t distributions provide more flexibility and better ability to accommodate long-tailed data than skew normal distributions. In this dissertation, a new non-central skew t distribution is studied and its theoretical properties are explored. Applications of the proposed non-central skew t distribution in data analysis and model comparisons are studied. An extension of our distribution to the multivariate case is presented and properties of the multivariate non-central skew t distri- bution are discussed. We also discuss the distribution of quadratic forms of the non-central skew t distribution. In the last chapter, the change point problem of the non-central skew t distribution is discussed under different settings.
    [Show full text]
  • A Family of Skew-Normal Distributions for Modeling Proportions and Rates with Zeros/Ones Excess
    S S symmetry Article A Family of Skew-Normal Distributions for Modeling Proportions and Rates with Zeros/Ones Excess Guillermo Martínez-Flórez 1, Víctor Leiva 2,* , Emilio Gómez-Déniz 3 and Carolina Marchant 4 1 Departamento de Matemáticas y Estadística, Facultad de Ciencias Básicas, Universidad de Córdoba, Montería 14014, Colombia; [email protected] 2 Escuela de Ingeniería Industrial, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, 2362807 Valparaíso, Chile 3 Facultad de Economía, Empresa y Turismo, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and TIDES Institute, 35001 Canarias, Spain; [email protected] 4 Facultad de Ciencias Básicas, Universidad Católica del Maule, 3466706 Talca, Chile; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected] or [email protected] Received: 30 June 2020; Accepted: 19 August 2020; Published: 1 September 2020 Abstract: In this paper, we consider skew-normal distributions for constructing new a distribution which allows us to model proportions and rates with zero/one inflation as an alternative to the inflated beta distributions. The new distribution is a mixture between a Bernoulli distribution for explaining the zero/one excess and a censored skew-normal distribution for the continuous variable. The maximum likelihood method is used for parameter estimation. Observed and expected Fisher information matrices are derived to conduct likelihood-based inference in this new type skew-normal distribution. Given the flexibility of the new distributions, we are able to show, in real data scenarios, the good performance of our proposal. Keywords: beta distribution; centered skew-normal distribution; maximum-likelihood methods; Monte Carlo simulations; proportions; R software; rates; zero/one inflated data 1.
    [Show full text]
  • Approximating the Distribution of the Product of Two Normally Distributed Random Variables
    S S symmetry Article Approximating the Distribution of the Product of Two Normally Distributed Random Variables Antonio Seijas-Macías 1,2 , Amílcar Oliveira 2,3 , Teresa A. Oliveira 2,3 and Víctor Leiva 4,* 1 Departamento de Economía, Universidade da Coruña, 15071 A Coruña, Spain; [email protected] 2 CEAUL, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, 1649-014 Lisboa, Portugal; [email protected] (A.O.); [email protected] (T.A.O.) 3 Departamento de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Aberta, 1269-001 Lisboa, Portugal 4 Escuela de Ingeniería Industrial, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Valparaíso 2362807, Chile * Correspondence: [email protected] or [email protected] Received: 21 June 2020; Accepted: 18 July 2020; Published: 22 July 2020 Abstract: The distribution of the product of two normally distributed random variables has been an open problem from the early years in the XXth century. First approaches tried to determinate the mathematical and statistical properties of the distribution of such a product using different types of functions. Recently, an improvement in computational techniques has performed new approaches for calculating related integrals by using numerical integration. Another approach is to adopt any other distribution to approximate the probability density function of this product. The skew-normal distribution is a generalization of the normal distribution which considers skewness making it flexible. In this work, we approximate the distribution of the product of two normally distributed random variables using a type of skew-normal distribution. The influence of the parameters of the two normal distributions on the approximation is explored. When one of the normally distributed variables has an inverse coefficient of variation greater than one, our approximation performs better than when both normally distributed variables have inverse coefficients of variation less than one.
    [Show full text]
  • Copulaesque Versions of the Skew-Normal Andskew-Student
    S S symmetry Article Copulaesque Versions of the Skew-Normal and Skew-Student Distributions Christopher Adcock Sheffield University Management School, University College Dublin, Sheffield S10 1FL, UK; c.j.adcock@sheffield.ac.uk Abstract: A recent paper presents an extension of the skew-normal distribution which is a copula. Under this model, the standardized marginal distributions are standard normal. The copula itself depends on the familiar skewing construction based on the normal distribution function. This paper is concerned with two topics. First, the paper presents a number of extensions of the skew-normal copula. Notably these include a case in which the standardized marginal distributions are Student’s t, with different degrees of freedom allowed for each margin. In this case the skewing function need not be the distribution function for Student’s t, but can depend on certain of the special functions. Secondly, several multivariate versions of the skew-normal copula model are presented. The paper contains several illustrative examples. Keywords: copula; multivariate distributions; skew-normal distributions; skew-Student distributions JEL Classification: C18; G01; G10; G12 Citation: Adcock, C.J. Copulaesque 1. Introduction Versions of the Skew-Normal and The recent paper by [1] presents an extension of the skew-normal distribution which Skew-Student Distributions. has subsequently been referred to as a copula. Under this model, the standardized marginal Symmetry 2021, 13, 815. https:// distributions are standard normal and some of the conditional distributions are skew- doi.org/10.3390/sym13050815 normal.The skew-normal distribution itself was introduced in two landmark papers [2] and [3]. These papers have led to a very substantial research effort by numerous authors Academic Editor: Nicola Maria over the last thirty five years.
    [Show full text]
  • Alpha-Skew Generalized T Distribution
    Revista Colombiana de Estadística July 2015, Volume 38, Issue 2, pp. 353 to 370 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15446/rce.v38n2.51665 Alpha-Skew Generalized t Distribution Distribución t generalizada alfa sesgada Sukru Acitas1;a, Birdal Senoglu2;b, Olcay Arslan2;c 1Department of Statistics, Faculty of Science, Anadolu University, Eskisehir, Turkey 2Department of Statistics, Faculty of Science, Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey Abstract The alpha-skew normal (ASN) distribution has been proposed recently in the literature by using standard normal distribution and a skewing ap- proach. Although ASN distribution is able to model both skew and bimodal data, it is shortcoming when data has thinner or thicker tails than normal. Therefore, we propose an alpha-skew generalized t (ASGT) by using the gen- eralized t (GT) distribution and a new skewing procedure. From this point of view, ASGT can be seen as an alternative skew version of GT distribution. However, ASGT differs from the previous skew versions of GT distribution since it is able to model bimodal data sest as well as it nests most commonly used density functions. In this paper, moments and maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters of ASGT distribution are given. Skewness and kurtosis measures are derived based on the first four noncentral moments. The cumulative distribution function (cdf) of ASGT distribution is also ob- tained. In the application part of the study, two real life problems taken from the literature are modeled by using ASGT distribution. Key words: Bimodality, Kurtosis, Maximum Likelihood Estimation, Mod- eling, Skewness. Resumen La distribución normal alfa-sesgada (ASN por sus siglas en inglés) ha sido propuesta recientemente en la literatura mediante el uso de una distribución normal estándar y procedimientos de sesgo.
    [Show full text]
  • Evaluating the CDF of the Skew Normal Distribution
    Evaluating the CDF of the Skew Normal Distribution Christine Amsler, Michigan State University Alecos Papadopoulos, Athens University of Economics and Business ∗ Peter Schmidt, Michigan State University April 3, 2020 Final version Abstract In this paper we consider various methods of evaluating the cdf of the Skew Nor- mal distribution. This distribution arises in the stochastic frontier model because it is the distribution of the composed error, which is the sum (or difference) of a Normal and a Half Normal random variable. The cdf must be evaluated in models in which the composed error is linked to other errors using a Copula, in some methods of goodness of fit testing, or in the likelihood of models with sample selection bias. We investigate the accuracy of the evaluation of the cdf using expressions based on the bivariate Normal distribution, and also using simulation methods and some approx- imations. We find that the expressions based on the bivariate Normal distribution are quite accurate in the central portion of the distribution, and we propose several new approximations that are accurate in the extreme tails. By a simulated example we show that the use of approximations instead of the theoretical exact expressions may be critical in obtaining meaningful and valid estimation results. Keywords: skew normal distribution, bivariate normal distribution, stochastic frontier, sim- ulation, computational software. JEL classification: C46, C87, C88, C13. ∗Corresponding author, e-mail: [email protected], ORCID ID: 0000-0003-2441-4550. 1 1 Introduction This article deals with the evaluation of the cumulative distribution function of the Skew Normal distribution (hereafter SN-cdf).
    [Show full text]
  • Alpha-Skew Generalized Normal Distribution and Its Applications
    Available at http://pvamu.edu/aam Applications and Applied Appl. Appl. Math. Mathematics: ISSN: 1932-9466 An International Journal (AAM) Vol. 14, Issue 2 (December 2019), pp. 784 - 804 Alpha-Skew Generalized Normal Distribution and its Applications 1*Eisa Mahmoudi, 2Hamideh Jafari and 3RahmatSadat Meshkat Department of Statistics Yazd University Yazd, Iran [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] * Corresponding Author Received: July 8, 2018; Accepted: November 11, 2019 Abstract The main object of this paper is to introduce a new family of distributions, which is quite flexible to fit both unimodal and bimodal shapes. This new family is entitled alpha-skew generalized normal (ASGN), that skews the symmetric distributions, especially generalized normal distribution through this paper. Here, some properties of this new distribution including cumulative distribution function, survival function, hazard rate function and moments are derived. To estimate the model parameters, the maximum likelihood estimators and the asymptotic distribution of the estimators are discussed. The observed information matrix is derived. Finally, the flexibility of the new distribution, as well as its effectiveness in comparison with other distributions, are shown via an application. Keywords: Alpha-skew distribution; Generalized normal distribution; Maximum likelihood estimator; Skew-normal distribution MSC 2010 No.: 60E05, 62F10 1. Introduction Recently, the skew-symmetric distributions have received considerable amount of attention, for example, the alpha skew normal (ASN) distribution is studied by Elal-Olivero (2010). First, he introduced a new symmetric bimodal-normal distribution with the pdf 784 AAM: Intern. J., Vol. 14, Issue 2 (December 2019) 785 f( y ) y2 ( y ), where is standard normal density function, and then defined alpha-skew-normal distribution as (1 y )2 1 f( y ; ) ( y ), y ¡¡, , 2 2 where is skew parameter.
    [Show full text]
  • Characterization of the Skew-Normal Distribution
    Ann. Inst. Statist. Math. Vol. 56, No. 2, 351-360 (2004) (~)2004 The Institute of Statistical Mathematics CHARACTERIZATION OF THE SKEW-NORMAL DISTRIBUTION ARJUN K. GUPTA 1, TRUC T. NGUYEN I AND JOSE ALMER T. SANQUl 2. 1Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH ~3~03-0221, U.S.A. 2Department of Mathematical Sciences, Appalachian State University, ASU Box 3209P, Boone, NC 28608-2092, U.S.A. (Received January 25, 2002; revised July 23, 2003) Abstract. Two characterization results for the skew-normal distribution based on quadratic statistics have been obtained. The results specialize to known character- izations of the standard normal distribution and generalize to the characterizations of members of a larger family of distributions. Results on the decomposition of the family of distributions of random variables whose square is distributed as X~ are obtained. Key words and phrases: Non-normal distribution, chi-square distribution, half- normal distribution, skew-symmetric distribution, sequence of moments, induction, decomposition, characteristic function. 1. Introduction A random variable Z has a skew-normal distribution with parameter A, denoted by Z ~-- SN(A), if its density is given by f(z, A) = 20(Az)r where and r are the standard normal cumulative distribution function and the standard normal probability density function, respectively, and z and A are real numbers (Azzalini (1985)). Some basic properties of the SN(A) distribution given in Azzalini (1985) are: 1. SN(O) = N(0, 1); 2. If Z ~ SN(A) then -Z ~ SN(-A); 3. As )~ -~ +c~, SN(A) tends to the half-normM distribution, i.e., the distribution of • I when X ~ g(0, 1); and 4.
    [Show full text]
  • Truncated Skew-Normal Distributions: Moments, Estimation by Weighted Moments and Application to Climatic Data
    Truncated skew-normal distributions: moments, estimation by weighted moments and application to climatic data by C. Flecher1;2, D. Allard1 and P. Naveau2 1 Biostatistics and Spatial Processes, INRA, Agroparc 84914 Avignon, France 2 Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, CNRS Gif-sur-Yvette, France Running title: Truncated skew-normal distributions Abstract In this paper we derive an expression of the mth order moments and some weighted mo- ments of truncated skew-normal distributions. We link these formulas to previous results for trun- cated distributions and non truncated skew-normal distributions. Methods to estimate skew-normal parameters using weighted moments are proposed and compared to other classical techniques. In a second step we propose to model the distribution of relative humidity with a truncated skew-normal distribution. Key words: Truncated skew-normal distributions, inference methods, classical moments, weighted moments, relative humidity. 1 1 Introduction In many applications, the probability distribution function (pdf) of some observed variables can be simultaneously skewed and restricted to a xed interval. For example, variables such as pH, grades, and humidity in environmental studies, have upper and lower physical bounds and their pdfs are not necessarily symmetric within these bounds. To illustrate such behaviors, Figure 1 shows the histograms per season and the estimated pdfs of daily relative humidity measurements made in Toulouse (France) from 1972 to 1999. Dec−Jan−Feb Mar−Apr−May Jun−Jul−Aug Sep−Oct−Nov 0.06 0.06 0.06 0.06 0.05 0.05 0.05 0.05 0.04 0.04 0.04 0.04 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.03 Density Density Density Density 0.02 0.02 0.02 0.02 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 20 40 60 80 100 0 20 40 60 80 100 0 20 40 60 80 100 0 20 40 60 80 100 H (%) H (%) H (%) H (%) Figure 1: Histograms and estimated densities of daily relative humidity measurements made in Toulouse (France) from 1972 to 1999.
    [Show full text]
  • The Skew-Normal Distribution in Spc
    REVSTAT – Statistical Journal Volume 11, Number 1, March 2013, 83–104 THE SKEW-NORMAL DISTRIBUTION IN SPC Authors: Fernanda Figueiredo – CEAUL and Faculdade de Economia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal [email protected] M. Ivette Gomes – Universidade de Lisboa, FCUL, DEIO and CEAUL, Portugal [email protected] Abstract: Modeling real data sets, even when we have some potential (as)symmetric models for • the underlying data distribution, is always a very difficult task due to some uncon- trollable perturbation factors. The analysis of different data sets from diverse areas of application, and in particular from statistical process control (SPC), leads us to notice that they usually exhibit moderate to strong asymmetry as well as light to heavy tails, which leads us to conclude that in most of the cases, fitting a normal distribution to the data is not the best option, despite of the simplicity and popu- larity of the Gaussian distribution. In this paper we consider a class of skew-normal models that include the normal distribution as a particular member. Some properties of the distributions belonging to this class are enhanced in order to motivate their use in applications. To monitor industrial processes some control charts for skew-normal and bivariate normal processes are developed, and their performance analyzed. An application with a real data set from a cork stopper’s process production is presented. Key-Words: bootstrap control charts; false alarm rate; heavy-tails; Monte Carlo simulations; • probability limits; run-length; shewhart control charts; skewness; skew-normal dis- tribution; statistical process control. AMS Subject Classification: 62G05, 62G35, 62P30, 65C05.
    [Show full text]
  • Study of Unified Multivariate Skew Normal Distribution with Applications in Finance and Actuarial Science
    STUDY OF UNIFIED MULTIVARIATE SKEW NORMAL DISTRIBUTION WITH APPLICATIONS IN FINANCE AND ACTUARIAL SCIENCE Mohammad Abdus Samad Aziz A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 2011 Committee: Arjun K. Gupta, Advisor Arthur Yeh, Graduate Faculty Representative John T. Chen Wei Ning ii ABSTRACT Arjun K. Gupta, Advisor The classical work horse in finance and insurance for modeling asset returns is the Gaus- sian model. However, when modeling complex random phenomena, more flexible distribu- tions are needed which are beyond the normal distribution. This is because most of the financial and economic data are skewed and have \fat tails" due to the presence of outliers. Hence symmetric distributions like normal or others may not be good choices while modeling these kinds of data. Flexible distributions like skew normal distribution allow robust model- ing of high-dimensional multimodal and asymmetric data. In this dissertation, we consider a very flexible financial model to construct robust comonotonic lower convex order bounds in approximating the distribution of the sums of dependent log skew normal random vari- ables. The dependence structure of these random variables is based on a recently developed multivariate skew normal distribution, called unified skew normal distribution. In order to accommodate the distribution to the model so considered, we first study inherent properties of this class of skew normal distribution. These properties along with the convex order and comonotonicity of random variables are then used to approximate the distribution function of terminal wealth. By calculating lower bounds in the convex order sense, we consider approximations that reduce the multivariate randomness to univariate randomness.
    [Show full text]