A New Extended Mixture Skew Normal Distribution, With Applications

Abstract

One of the most important property of the mixture normal distributions-model is its flexibility to accommodate various types of distribution functions (df's). We show that the mixture of the skew normal distribution and its reverse, after adding a location parameter to the skew normal distribution, and adding the same location parameter with different sign to its reverse is a family of df's that contains all the possible types of df's. Besides, it has a very remarkable wide range of the indices of skewness and kurtosis. Computational techniques using EM-type algorithms are employed for iteratively computing maximum likelihood estimates of the model parameters. Moreover, an application with a body mass index real data set is presented.