ROBUST INFERENCE IN PARAMETRIC MODELS USING THE FAMILY OF GENERALIZED NEGATIVE EXPONENTIAL DISPARITIES

We examine robust estimators and tests using the family of generalized negative exponential disparities, which contains the Pearson's chi‐square and the ordinary negative exponential disparity as special cases. The influence function and α‐influence function of the proposed estimators are discussed and their breakdown points derived. Under the model, the estimators are asymptotically efficient, and are shown to have an asymptotic breakdown point of 50%. The proposed tests are shown to be equivalent to the likelihood ratio test under the null hypothesis, and their breakdown points are obtained. The competitive performance of the proposed estimators and tests relative to those based on the Hellinger distance is illustrated through examples and simulation results. Unlike the Hellinger distance, several members of this family of generalized negative exponential disparities generate estimators which also possess excellent inlier‐controlling capability. The corresponding tests of hypothesis are shown to have better power breakdown than the Hellinger deviance test in the cases examined.     

Negative exponential disparity based family of goodness-of-fit tests for multinomial models

This paper investigates a new family of goodness-of-fit tests based on the negative exponential disparities. This family includes the popular Pearson's chi-square as a member and is a subclass of the general class of disparity tests (Basu and Sarkar, 1994) which also contains the family of power divergence statistics. Pitman efficiency and finite sample power comparisons between different members of this new family are made. Three asymptotic approximations of the exact null distributions of the negative exponential disparity famiiy of tests are discussed. Some numerical results on the small sample perfomance of this family of tests are presented for the symmetric null hypothesis. It is shown that the negative exponential disparity famiiy, Like the power divergence family, produces a new goodness-of-fit test statistic that can be a very attractive alternative to the Pearson's chi-square. Some numerical results suggest that, application of this test statistic, as an alternative to Pearson's chi-square, could be preferable to the I ^2/3 statistic of Cressie and Read (1984) under the use of chi-square critical values.     

The skew generalized t distribution as the scale mixture of a skew exponential power distribution and its applications in robust estimation

In this paper, we consider the family of skew generalized t (SGT) distributions originally introduced by Theodossiou [P. Theodossiou, Financial data and the skewed generalized t distribution, Manage. Sci. Part 1 44 (12) ( 1998), pp. 1650–1661] as a skew extension of the generalized t (GT) distribution. The SGT distribution family warrants special attention, because it encompasses distributions having both heavy tails and skewness, and many of the widely used distributions such as Student's t, normal, Hansen's skew t, exponential power, and skew exponential power (SEP) distributions are included as limiting or special cases in the SGT family. We show that the SGT distribution can be obtained as the scale mixture of the SEP and generalized gamma distributions. We investigate several properties of the SGT distribution and consider the maximum likelihood estimation of the location, scale, and skewness parameters under the assumption that the shape parameters are known. We show that if the shape parameters are estimated along with the location, scale, and skewness parameters, the influence function for the maximum likelihood estimators becomes unbounded. We obtain the necessary conditions to ensure the uniqueness of the maximum likelihood estimators for the location, scale, and skewness parameters, with known shape parameters. We provide a simple iterative re-weighting algorithm to compute the maximum likelihood estimates for the location, scale, and skewness parameters and show that this simple algorithm can be identified as an EM-type algorithm. We finally present two applications of the SGT distributions in robust estimation.     

A new four-parameter discrete distribution with bathtub and unimodal failure rate

In this paper, a discrete counterpart of the general class of continuous beta-G distributions is introduced. A discrete analog of the beta generalized exponential distribution of Barreto-Souza et al. [2], as an important special case of the proposed class, is studied. This new distribution contains some previously known discrete distributions as well as two new models. The hazard rate function of the new model can be increasing, decreasing, bathtub-shaped and upside-down bathtub. Some distributional and moment properties of the new distribution as well as its order statistics are discussed. Estimation of the parameters is illustrated using the maximum likelihood method and, finally, the model with a real data set is examined.     

Discrete generalized exponential distribution of a second type

In this paper, we shall attempt to introduce another discrete analogue of the generalized exponential distribution of Gupta and Kundu [Generalized exponential distributions, Aust. N. Z. J. Stat. 41(2) (1999), pp. 173–188], different to that of Nekoukhou et al. [A discrete analogue of the generalized exponential distribution, Comm. Stat. Theory Methods, to appear (2011)]. This new discrete distribution, which we shall call a discrete generalized exponential distribution of the second type (DGE₂(α, p)), can be viewed as another generalization of the geometric distribution. We shall first study some basic distributional and moment properties, as well as order statistics distributions of this family of new distributions. Certain compounded DGE₂(α, p) distributions are also discussed as the results of which some previous lifetime distributions such as that of Adamidis and Loukas [A lifetime distribution with decreasing failure rate, Statist. Probab. Lett. 39 (1998), pp. 35–42] follow as corollaries. Then, we will investigate estimation of the parameters involved. Finally, we will examine the model with a real data set.     

The beta exponentiated Weibull distribution

The Weibull distribution is one of the most important distributions in reliability. For the first time, we introduce the beta exponentiated Weibull distribution which extends recent models by Lee et al. [Beta-Weibull distribution: some properties and applications to censored data, J. Mod. Appl. Statist. Meth. 6 (2007), pp. 173–186] and Barreto-Souza et al. [The beta generalized exponential distribution, J. Statist. Comput. Simul. 80 (2010), pp. 159–172]. The new distribution is an important competitive model to the Weibull, exponentiated exponential, exponentiated Weibull, beta exponential and beta Weibull distributions since it contains all these models as special cases. We demonstrate that the density of the new distribution can be expressed as a linear combination of Weibull densities. We provide the moments and two closed-form expressions for the moment-generating function. Explicit expressions are derived for the mean deviations, Bonferroni and Lorenz curves, reliability and entropies. The density of the order statistics can also be expressed as a linear combination of Weibull densities. We obtain the moments of the order statistics. The expected information matrix is derived. We define a log-beta exponentiated Weibull regression model to analyse censored data. The estimation of the parameters is approached by the method of maximum likelihood. The usefulness of the new distribution to analyse positive data is illustrated in two real data sets.     

THE MAXIMUM RESISTANCE OF TESTS

The breakdown point of an estimator is the smallest fraction of contamination that can force the value of the estimator beyond the boundary of the parameter space. It is well known that the highest possible breakdown point, under equivariance restrictions, is 50% of the sample. However, this upper bound is not always attainable. We give an example of an estimation problem in which the highest possible attainable breakdown point is much less than 50% of the sample. For hypothesis testing, we discuss the resistance of a test and propose new definitions of resistance. The maximum resistance to rejection (acceptance) is the smallest fraction of contamination necessary to force a test to reject (fail to reject) regardless of the original sample. We derive the maximum resistances of the t-test and sign test in the one-sample problem and of the t-test and Mood test in the two-sample problem. We briefly discuss another measure known as the expected resistance.     

Panel Seasonal Unit Root Test: Further Simulation Results and An Application to Unemployment Data

Summary: In this paper the seasonal unit root test of Hylleberg et al. (1990) is generalized to cover a heterogenous panel. The procedure follows the work of Im, Pesaran and Shin (2002) and is independently proposed by Otero et al. (2004). Test statistics are given and critical values are obtained by simulation. Moreover, the properties of the tests are analyzed for different deterministic and dynamic specifications. Evidence is presented that for a small time series dimension the power is low even for increasing cross section dimension. Therefore, it seems necessary to have a higher time series dimension than cross section dimension. The test is applied to unemployment data in industrialized countries. In some cases seasonal unit roots are detected. However, the null hypotheses of panel seasonal unit roots are rejected. The null hypothesis of a unit root at the zero frequency is not rejected, thereby supporting the presence of hysteresis effects. * The research of this paper was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The paper was presented at the workshop “Unit roots and cointegration in panel data” in Frankfurt, October 2004 and in the poster-session at the EC2 meeting in Marseille, December 2004. We are grateful to the participants of the workshops and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments.     

A note on infinite-armed Bernoulli bandit problems with generalized beta prior distributions

A bandit problem with infinitely many Bernoulli arms is considered. The parameters of Bernoulli arms are independent and identically distributed random variables from a generalized beta distributionG3B(a, b, λ) witha, b>0 and 0<λ<2. Under the generalized beta prior distributions, we first derive the asymptotic expected failure rates ofk-failure strategies, and then obtain a lower bound for the expected failure rate over all strategies investigated in Berry et al. (1997). The asymptotic expected failure rates for the other three strategies studied in Berry et al. (1997) are also included. Numerical estimations for a variety of generalized beta prior distributions are presented to illustrate the performances of these strategies.     

On progressive hybrid censored exponential distribution

In this paper, we introduce a new adaptive Type-I progressive hybrid censoring scheme, which has some advantages over the progressive hybrid censoring schemes already discussed in the literature. Based on an adaptive Type-I progressively hybrid censored sample, we derive the exact distribution of the maximum-likelihood estimator (MLE) of the mean lifetime of an exponential distribution as well as confidence intervals for the failure rate using exact distribution, asymptotic distribution, and three parametric bootstrap resampling methods. Furthermore, we provide computational formula for the expected number of failures and investigate the performance of the point and interval estimation for the failure rate in this case. An alternative simple form for the distribution of the MLE under adaptive Type-II progressive hybrid censoring scheme proposed by Ng et al. [Statistical analysis of exponential lifetimes under an adaptive Type-II progressive censoring scheme, Naval Res. Logist. 56 (2009), pp. 687–698] is obtained. Finally, from the exact distribution of the MLE, we establish the explicit expression for the Bayes risk of a sampling plan under adaptive Type-II progressive hybrid censoring scheme when a general loss function is used, and present some optimal Bayes solutions under four different progressive hybrid censoring schemes to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Exact distribution of the MLEs of the parameters and of the quantiles of two-parameter exponential distribution under hybrid censoring

Epstein [Truncated life tests in the exponential case, Ann. Math. Statist. 25 (1954), pp. 555–564] introduced a hybrid censoring scheme (called Type-I hybrid censoring) and Chen and Bhattacharyya [Exact confidence bounds for an exponential parameter under hybrid censoring, Comm. Statist. Theory Methods 17 (1988), pp. 1857–1870] derived the exact distribution of the maximum-likelihood estimator (MLE) of the mean of a scaled exponential distribution based on a Type-I hybrid censored sample. Childs et al. [Exact likelihood inference based on Type-I and Type-II hybrid censored samples from the exponential distribution, Ann. Inst. Statist. Math. 55 (2003), pp. 319–330] provided an alternate simpler expression for this distribution, and also developed analogous results for another hybrid censoring scheme (called Type-II hybrid censoring). The purpose of this paper is to derive the exact bivariate distribution of the MLE of the parameter vector of a two-parameter exponential model based on hybrid censored samples. The marginal distributions are derived and exact confidence bounds for the parameters are obtained. The results are also used to derive the exact distribution of the MLE of the pth quantile, as well as the corresponding confidence bounds. These exact confidence intervals are then compared with parametric bootstrap confidence intervals in terms of coverage probabilities. Finally, we present some numerical examples to illustrate the methods of inference developed here.     

The Disappointing Properties of GLS-Based Unit Root Tests in the Presence of Structural Breaks

Abstract

It is well known that prior application of GLS detrending, as advocated by Elliot et al. [Elliot, G., Rothenberg, T., Stock, J. (1996). Efficient tests for an autoregressive unit root. Econometrica 64:813–836], can produce a significant increase in power to reject the unit root null over that obtained from a conventional OLS-based Dickey and Fuller [Dickey, D., Fuller, W. (1979). Distribution of the estimators for autoregressive time series with a unit root. J. Am. Statist. Assoc. 74:427–431] testing equation. However, this paper employs Monte Carlo simulation to demonstrate that this increase in power is not necessarily obtained when breaks occur in either level or trend. It is found that neither OLS nor GLS-based tests are robust to level or trend breaks, their size and power properties both deteriorating as the break size increases.     

Bayesian estimation for non zero inflated modified power series distribution under linex and generalized entropy loss functions

Abstract

In this paper, we derive Bayesian estimators of the parameters of modified power series distributions inflated at any of a support point under linex and general entropy loss function. We assume that the prior information can be summarized by a uniform, Beta, two-sided power, Gamma or generalized Pareto distributions. The obtained results are demonstrated on the generalized Poisson and the generalized negative binomial distribution inflated at a given point.     

Rényi statistics for testing composite hypotheses in general exponential models

We introduce a family of Rényi statistics of orders r?∈?R for testing composite hypotheses in general exponential models, as alternatives to the previously considered generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) statistic and generalized Wald statistic. If appropriately normalized exponential models converge in a specific sense when the sample size (observation window) tends to infinity, and if the hypothesis is regular, then these statistics are shown to be χ²-distributed under the hypothesis. The corresponding Rényi tests are shown to be consistent. The exact sizes and powers of asymptotically α-size Rényi, GLR and generalized Wald tests are evaluated for a concrete hypothesis about a bivariate Lévy process and moderate observation windows. In this concrete situation the exact sizes of the Rényi test of the order r?=?2 practically coincide with those of the GLR and generalized Wald tests but the exact powers of the Rényi test are on average somewhat better.     

Simultaneous semi-sequential testing of dual alternatives for pattern recognition

In this paper, we propose a new nonparametric simultaneous test for dual alternatives. Simultaneous tests for dual alternatives are used for pattern detection of arsenic contamination level in ground water. We consider two possible patterns, namely, monotone shift and an umbrella-type location alternative, as the dual alternatives. Pattern recognition problems of this nature are addressed in Bandyopadhyay et al. [5], stretching the idea of multiple hypotheses tests as in Benjamini and Hochberg [6]. In the present context, we develop an alternative approach based on contrasts that helps us to detect three underlying pattern much more efficiently. We illustrate the new methodology through a motivating example related to highly sensitive issue of arsenic contamination in ground water. We provide some Monte-Carlo studies related to the proposed technique and give a comparative study between different detection procedures. We also obtain some related asymptotic results.     

Comment on “Exact Bayesian variable sampling plans for the exponential distribution with progressive hybrid censoring”

Lin et al. [Exact Bayesian variable sampling plans for the exponential distribution with progressive hybrid censoring, J. Stat. Comput. Simul. 81 (2011), pp. 873–882] claimed to have derived exact Bayesian sampling plans for exponential distributions with progressive hybrid censoring. We comment on the accuracy of the design parameters of their proposed sampling plans and the associated Bayes risks given in tables of Lin et al. [Exact Bayesian variable sampling plans for the exponential distribution with progressive hybrid censoring, J. Stat. Comput. Simul. 81 (2011), pp. 873–882]. Counter-examples to their claim are provided.     

Local power of some tests in exponential family nonlinear models

In this paper we obtain asymptotic expansions up to order n^−1/2 for the nonnull distribution functions of the likelihood ratio, Wald, score and gradient test statistics in exponential family nonlinear models (Cordeiro and Paula, 1989), under a sequence of Pitman alternatives. The asymptotic distributions of all four statistics are obtained for testing a subset of regression parameters and for testing the dispersion parameter, thus generalising the results given in Cordeiro et al. (1994) and Ferrari et al. (1997). We also present Monte Carlo simulations in order to compare the finite-sample performance of these tests.     

Correcting moments for goodness of fit tests based on two entropy estimates

The sample entropy (Vasicek, 1976) has been most widely used as a nonparametric entropy estimator due to its simplicity, but its underlying distribution function has not been known yet though its moments are required in establishing the entropy-based goodness of test statistic (Soofi et al., 1995). In this paper we derive the nonparametric distribution function of the sample entropy as a piece-wise uniform distribution in the lights of Theil (1980) and Dudwicz and van der Meulen (1987). Then we establish the entropy-based goodness of fit test statistics based on the nonparametric distribution functions of the sample entropy and modified sample entropy (Ebrahimi et al., 1994), and compare their performances for the exponential and normal distributions.     

The Asymptotic Power Of Jonckheere-Type Tests For Ordered Alternatives

For the c -sample location problem with ordered alternatives, the test proposed by Barlow et al . (1972 p. 184) is an appropriate one under the model of normality. For non-normal data, however, there are rank tests which have higher power than the test of Barlow et al ., e.g. the Jonckheere test or so-called Jonckheere-type tests recently introduced and studied by Büning & Kössler (1996). In this paper the asymptotic power of the Jonckheere-type tests is computed by using results of Hájek (1968) which may be considered as extensions of the theorem of Chernoff & Savage (1958). Power studies via Monte Carlo simulation show that the asymptotic power values provide a good approximation to the finite ones even for moderate sample sizes.