| Abstract: | This paper presents two types of symmetric scale mixture probability distributions which include the normal, Student t, Pearson Type VII, variance gamma, exponential power, uniform power and generalized t (GT) distributions. Expressing a symmetric distribution into a scale mixture form enables efficient Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms in the implementation of complicated statistical models. Moreover, the mixing parameters, a by-product of the scale mixture representation, can be used to identify possible outliers. This paper also proposes a uniform scale mixture representation for the GT density, and demonstrates how this density representation alleviates the computational burden of the Gibbs sampler. |
