This work provides a survey of the general class of distributions generated from the mixture of the beta random variables. We provide an extensive review of the literature, concerning generating new distributions via the inverse CDF transformation. In particular, we accounted for beta generated and Kumaraswamy generated families of distributions. We provide a brief summary of each of their families of distributions. We also propose a new asymmetric mixture distribution, which is an alternative to beta generated distributions. We provide basic properties of this new class of distributions generated from the Laplace model. We also address the issue of parameter estimation of this new skew generalized Laplace model.
In this paper we present the results from an empirical power comparison of 40 goodness-of-fit tests for the univariate Laplace distribution, carried out using Monte Carlo simulations with sample sizes $n = 20, 50, 100, 200$, significance levels $α= 0.01, 0.05, 0.10$, and 400 alternatives consisting of asymmetric and symmetric light/heavy-tailed distributions taken as special cases from 11 models. In addition to the unmatched scope of our study, an interesting contribution is the proposal of an innovative design for the selection of alternatives. The 400 alternatives consist of 20 specific case…
A sandwich likelihood correction is proposed to remedy an inferential limitation of the Bayesian quantile regression approach based on the misspecified asymmetric Laplace density, by leveraging the benefits of the approach. Supporting theoretical results and simulations are presented.
Protection of individual privacy is a common concern when releasing and sharing data and information. Differential privacy (DP) formalizes privacy in probabilistic terms without making assumptions about the background knowledge of data intruders, and thus provides a robust concept for privacy protection. Practical applications of DP involve development of differentially private mechanisms to generate sanitized results at a pre-specified privacy budget. For the sanitization of statistics with publicly known bounds such as proportions and correlation coefficients, the bounding constraints will n…
We tackle the modeling of threshold exceedances in asymptotically independent stochastic processes by constructions based on Laplace random fields. These are defined as Gaussian random fields scaled with a stochastic variable following an exponential distribution. This framework yields useful asymptotic properties while remaining statistically convenient. Univariate distribution tails are of the half exponential type and are part of the limiting generalized Pareto distributions for threshold exceedances. After normalizing marginal tail distributions in data, a standard Laplace field can be use…
Mixtures of shifted asymmetric Laplace distributions were introduced as a tool for model-based clustering that allowed for the direct parameterization of skewness in addition to location and scale. Following common practices, an expectation-maximization algorithm was developed to fit these mixtures. However, adaptations to account for the `infinite likelihood problem' led to fits that gave good classification performance at the expense of parameter recovery. In this paper, we propose a more valuable solution to this problem by developing a novel Bayesian parameter estimation scheme for mixture…
Mixture models whose components have skewed hypercube contours are developed via a generalization of the multivariate shifted asymmetric Laplace density. Specifically, we develop mixtures of multiple scaled shifted asymmetric Laplace distributions. The component densities have two unique features: they include a multivariate weight function, and the marginal distributions are also asymmetric Laplace. We use these mixtures of multiple scaled shifted asymmetric Laplace distributions for clustering applications, but they could equally well be used in the supervised or semi-supervised paradigms. T…
Mixtures of multivariate contaminated shifted asymmetric Laplace distributions are developed for handling asymmetric clusters in the presence of outliers (also referred to as bad points herein). In addition to the parameters of the related non-contaminated mixture, for each (asymmetric) cluster, our model has one parameter controlling the proportion of outliers and one specifying the degree of contamination. Crucially, these parameters do not have to be specified a priori, adding a flexibility to our approach that is absent from other approaches such as trimming. Moreover, each observation is …
Recent studies about cryptocurrency returns show that its distribution can be highly-peaked, skewed, and heavy-tailed, with a large excess kurtosis. To accommodate all these peculiarities, we propose the asymmetric Laplace scale mixture (ALSM) family of distributions. Each member of the family is obtained by dividing the scale parameter of the conditional asymmetric Laplace (AL) distribution by a convenient mixing random variable taking values on all or part of the positive real line and whose distribution depends on a parameter vector $\boldsymbolθ$ providing greater flexibility to the result…
Multivariate spatial-statistical models are often used when modeling environmental and socio-demographic processes. The most commonly used models for multivariate spatial covariances assume both stationarity and symmetry for the cross-covariances, but these assumptions are rarely tenable in practice. In this article we introduce a new and highly flexible class of nonstationary and asymmetric multivariate spatial covariance models that are constructed by modeling the simpler and more familiar stationary and symmetric multivariate covariances on a warped domain. Inspired by recent developments i…
We propose a new family of error distributions for model-based quantile regression, which is constructed through a structured mixture of normal distributions. The construction enables fixing specific percentiles of the distribution while, at the same time, allowing for varying mode, skewness and tail behavior. It thus overcomes the severe limitation of the asymmetric Laplace distribution -- the most commonly used error model for parametric quantile regression -- for which the skewness of the error density is fully specified when a particular percentile is fixed. We develop a Bayesian formulati…
This article introduces the R package evgam. The package provides functions for fitting extreme value distributions. These include the generalized extreme value and generalized Pareto distributions. The former can also be fitted through a point process representation. evgam supports quantile regression via the asymmetric Laplace distribution, which can be useful for estimating high thresholds, sometimes used to discriminate between extreme and non-extreme values. The main addition of evgam is to let extreme value distribution parameters have generalized additive model forms, which can be objec…
A new class of copulas, termed the MGL copula class, is introduced. The new copula originates from extracting the dependence function of the multivariate generalized log-Moyal-gamma distribution whose marginals follow the univariate generalized log-Moyal-gamma (GLMGA) distribution as introduced in \citet{li2019jan}. The MGL copula can capture nonelliptical, exchangeable, and asymmetric dependencies among marginal coordinates and provides a simple formulation for regression applications. We discuss the probabilistic characteristics of MGL copula and obtain the corresponding extreme-value copula…
In this work we discuss the progress of Bayesian quantile regression models since their first proposal and we discuss the importance of all parameters involved in the inference process. Using a representation of the asymmetric Laplace distribution as a mixture of a normal and an exponential distribution, we discuss the relevance of the presence of a scale parameter to control for the variance in the model. Besides that we consider the posterior distribution of the latent variable present in the mixture representation to showcase outlying observations given the Bayesian quantile regression fits…
Univariate normal regression models are statistical tools widely applied in many areas of economics. Nevertheless, income data have asymmetric behavior and are best modeled by non-normal distributions. The modeling of income plays an important role in determining workers' earnings, as well as being an important research topic in labor economics. Thus, the objective of this work is to propose parametric quantile regression models based on two important asymmetric income distributions, namely, Dagum and Singh-Maddala distributions. The proposed quantile models are based on reparameterizations of…
Univariate regression models have rich literature for counting data. However, this is not the case for multivariate count data. Therefore, we present the Multivariate Generalized Linear Mixed Models framework that deals with a multivariate set of responses, measuring the correlation between them through random effects that follows a multivariate normal distribution. This model is based on a GLMM with a random intercept and the estimation process remains the same as a standard GLMM with random effects integrated out via Laplace approximation. We efficiently implemented this model through the TM…
This paper develops a two-part finite mixture quantile regression model for semi-continuous longitudinal data. The proposed methodology allows heterogeneity sources that influence the model for the binary response variable, to influence also the distribution of the positive outcomes. As is common in the quantile regression literature, estimation and inference on the model parameters are based on the Asymmetric Laplace distribution. Maximum likelihood estimates are obtained through the EM algorithm without parametric assumptions on the random effects distribution. In addition, a penalized versi…
