Skew-symmetric distributions and Fisher information -- a tale of two densities

Skew-symmetric densities recently received much attention in the literature, giving rise to increasingly general families of univariate and multivariate skewed densities. Most of those families, however, suffer from the inferential drawback of a potentially singular Fisher information in the vicinity of symmetry. All existing results indicate that Gaussian densities (possibly after restriction to some linear subspace) play a special and somewhat intriguing role in that context. We dispel that widespread opinion by providing a full characterization, in a general multivariate context, of the information singularity phenomenon, highlighting its relation to a possible link between symmetric kernels and skewing functions -- a link that can be interpreted as the mismatch of two densities.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/12-BEJ346 the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm

Flexible modelling in statistics: past, present and future

In times where more and more data become available and where the data exhibit rather complex structures (significant departure from symmetry, heavy or light tails), flexible modelling has become an essential task for statisticians as well as researchers and practitioners from domains such as economics, finance or environmental sciences. This is reflected by the wealth of existing proposals for flexible distributions; well-known examples are Azzalini's skew-normal, Tukey's $g$-and-$h$, mixture and two-piece distributions, to cite but these. My aim in the present paper is to provide an introduction to this research field, intended to be useful both for novices and professionals of the domain. After a description of the research stream itself, I will narrate the gripping history of flexible modelling, starring emblematic heroes from the past such as Edgeworth and Pearson, then depict three of the most used flexible families of distributions, and finally provide an outlook on future flexible modelling research by posing challenging open questions.Comment: 27 pages, 4 figure

On the Independence Jeffreys prior for skew--symmetric models with applications

We study the Jeffreys prior of the skewness parameter of a general class of scalar skew--symmetric models. It is shown that this prior is symmetric about 0, proper, and with tails $O(\lambda^{-3/2})$ under mild regularity conditions. We also calculate the independence Jeffreys prior for the case with unknown location and scale parameters. Sufficient conditions for the existence of the corresponding posterior distribution are investigated for the case when the sampling model belongs to the family of skew--symmetric scale mixtures of normal distributions. The usefulness of these results is illustrated using the skew--logistic model and two applications with real data

Bayesian Multivariate Regression Analysis with a New Class of Skewed Distributions

In this paper, we introduce a novel class of skewed multivariate distributions and, more generally, a method of building such a class on the basis of univariate skewed distributions. The method is based on a general linear transformation of a multidimensional random variable with independent components, each with a skewed distribution. Our proposed class of multivariate skewed distributions has a simple, intuitive form for the pdf, moment existence only depends on the existence of the moments of the underlying symmetric univariate distributions, and we avoid any conditioning on unobserved variables. In addition, we can freely allow for any mean and covariance structure in combination with any magnitude and direction of skewness. In order to deal with both skewness and fat tails, we introduce multivariate skewed regression models with fat tails, based on Student distributions. We present two main classes of such distributions, one of which is novel even under symmetry. Under standard non-informative priors on both regression and scale parameters, we derive conditions for propriety of the posterior and for existence of posterior moments. We describe MCMC samplers for conducting Bayesian inference and analyse two applications, one concerning the distribution of various measures of firm size and another on a set of biomedical data.Asymmetric distributions; Heavy tails; Linear regression model; Mardia's measure of skewness; Orthogonal matrices; Posterior propriety.

Statistical applications of the multivariate skew-normal distribution

Azzalini & Dalla Valle (1996) have recently discussed the multivariate skew-normal distribution which extends the class of normal distributions by the addition of a shape parameter. The first part of the present paper examines further probabilistic properties of the distribution, with special emphasis on aspects of statistical relevance. Inferential and other statistical issues are discussed in the following part, with applications to some multivariate statistics problems, illustrated by numerical examples. Finally, a further extension is described which introduces a skewing factor of an elliptical density.Comment: full-length version of the published paper, 32 pages, with 7 figures, uses psfra

Skew-rotationally-symmetric distributions and related efficient inferential procedures

peer reviewedMost commonly used distributions on the unit hypersphere Sk−1={v∈Rk:v⊤v=1}, k≥2, assume that the data are rotationally symmetric about some direction θ∈Sk−1. However, there is empirical evidence that this assumption often fails to describe reality. We study in this paper a new class of skew-rotationally-symmetric distributions on Sk−1 that enjoy numerous good properties. We discuss the Fisher information structure of the model and derive efficient inferential procedures. In particular, we obtain the first semi-parametric test for rotational symmetry about a known direction. We also propose a second test for rotational symmetry, obtained through the definition of a new measure of skewness on the hypersphere. We investigate the finite-sample behavior of the new tests through a Monte Carlo simulation study. We conclude the paper with a discussion about some intriguing open questions related to our new models

Bayesian inference for skew-symmetric distributions

Skew-symmetric distributions are a popular family of flexible distributions that conveniently model non-normal features such as skewness, kurtosis and multimodality. Unfortunately, their frequentist inference poses several difficulties, which may be adequately addressed by means of a Bayesian approach. This paper reviews the main prior distributions proposed for the parameters of skew-symmetric distributions, with special emphasis on the skew-normal and the skew-t distributions which are the most prominent skew-symmetric models. The paper focuses on the univariate case in the absence of covariates, but more general models are also discussed

Distributions generated by perturbation of symmetry with emphasis on a multivariate skew tt distribution

A fairly general procedure is studied to perturbate a multivariate density satisfying a weak form of multivariate symmetry, and to generate a whole set of non-symmetric densities. The approach is general enough to encompass a number of recent proposals in the literature, variously related to the skew normal distribution. The special case of skew elliptical densities is examined in detail, establishing connections with existing similar work. The final part of the paper specializes further to a form of multivariate skew $t$ density. Likelihood inference for this distribution is examined, and it is illustrated with numerical examples.Comment: full-length version of the published paper, 31 pages with 9 figure

Skew-symmetric distributions and Fisher information

Hallin and Ley (2012) investigate and fully characterize the Fisher singularity phenomenon in univariate and multivariate families of skew-symmetric distributions. This paper proposes a refined analysis of the (univariate) Fisher degeneracy problem, showing that it can be more or less severe, inducing n1/4 (“simple singularity”), n1/6 (“double singularity”), or n1/8 (“triple singularity”) consistency rates for the skewness parameter. We show, however, that simple singularity (yielding n1/4 consistency rates), if any singularity at all, is the rule, in the sense that double and triple singularities are possible for generalized skew-normal families only. We also show that higher-order singularities, leading to worse-than-n1/8 rates, cannot occur