The Extended Birnbaum–Saunders Distribution Based on the Scale Shape Mixture of Skew Normal Distributions

In this article, a large class of univriate Birnbaum–Saunders distributions based on the scale shape mixture of skew normal distributions is introduced which generates suitable subclasses for modeling asymmetric data in a variety of settings. The moments and maximum likelihood estimation procedures are disscused via an ECM-algorithm. The observed information matrix to approximate the asymptotic covariance matrix of the parameter estimates is then derived in some subclasses. A simulation study is also performed to evaluate the finite sample properties of ML estimators and finally, a real data set is analyzed for illustrative purposes.

Variable selection for skew-normal mixture of joint location and scale models

Although there are many papers on variable selection methods based on mean model in the finite mixture of regression models, little work has been done on how to select significant explanatory variables in the modeling of the variance parameter. In this paper, we propose and study a novel class of models: a skew-normal mixture of joint location and scale models to analyze the heteroscedastic skew-normal data coming from a heterogeneous population. The problem of variable selection for the proposed models is considered. In particular, a modified Expectation-Maximization(EM) algorithm for estimating the model parameters is developed. The consistency and the oracle property of the penalized estimators is established. Simulation studies are conducted to investigate the finite sample performance of the proposed methodologies. An example is illustrated by the proposed methodologies.