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Insurance and economic data are often positive, and we need to take into account this peculiarity in choosing a statistical model for their distribution. An example is the inverse Gaussian (IG), which is one of the most famous and considered distributions with positive support. With the aim of increasing the use of the IG distribution on insurance and economic data, we propose a convenient mode-based parameterization yielding the reparametrized IG (rIG) distribution; it allows/simplifies the use of the IG distribution in various branches of statistics, and we give some examples. In nonparametric statistics, we define a smoother based on rIG kernels. By construction, the estimator is well-defined and does not allocate probability mass to unrealistic negative values. We adopt likelihood cross-validation to select the smoothing parameter. In robust statistics, we propose the contaminated IG distribution, a heavy-tailed generalization of the rIG distribution to accommodate mild outliers. Finally, for model-based clustering and semiparametric density estimation, we present finite mixtures of rIG distributions. We use the EM algorithm to obtain maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters of the mixture and contaminated models. We use insurance data about bodily injury claims, and economic data about incomes of Italian households, to illustrate the models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of matrix-variate data is becoming ever more prevalent in the literature, especially in the area of clustering and classification. Real data, including real matrix-variate data, are often contaminated by potential outlying observations. Their detection, as well as the development of models insensitive to their presence, is particularly important for this type of data because of the practical issues concerning their effective visualization. Herein, the matrix-variate contaminated normal distribution is discussed and then utilized in the mixture model paradigm for clustering. One key advantage of the proposed model is the ability to automatically detect potential outlying matrices by computing their a posteriori probability of being typical or atypical. Such detection is currently unavailable using existing matrix-variate methods. An expectation conditional maximization algorithm is used for parameter estimation, and both simulated and real data are used for illustration. Supplementary files for this article are available online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cluster-weighted models (CWMs) extend finite mixtures of regressions (FMRs) in order to allow the distribution of covariates to contribute to the clustering process. In this article, we introduce 24 matrix-variate CWMs which are obtained by allowing both the responses and covariates in each cluster to be modelled by one of four existing skewed matrix-variate distributions or the matrix-variate normal distribution. Endowed with greater flexibility, our matrix-variate CWMs are able to handle this kind of data in a more suitable manner. As a by-product, the four skewed matrix-variate FMRs are also introduced. Maximum likelihood parameter estimates are derived using an expectation-conditional maximization algorithm. Parameter recovery, classification assessment, and the capability of the Bayesian information criterion to detect the underlying groups are investigated using simulated data. Lastly, our matrix-variate CWMs, along with the matrix-variate normal CWM and matrix-variate FMRs, are applied to two real datasets for illustrative purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article enlarges the covariance configurations, on which the classical linear discriminant analysis is based, by considering the four models arising from the spectral decomposition when eigenvalues and/or eigenvectors matrices are allowed to vary or not between groups. As in the classical approach, the assessment of these configurations is accomplished via a test on the training set. The discrimination rule is then built upon the configuration provided by the test, considering or not the unlabeled data. Numerical experiments, on simulated and real data, have been performed to evaluate the gain of our proposal with respect to the linear discriminant analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]