Distributions for Modeling Location, Scale, and Shape-Using GAMLSS in R

✍ Scribed by Robert A. Rigby (Author); Mikis D. Stasinopoulos (Author); Gillian Z. Heller (Author); Fernanda De Bastiani (Author)

• Publisher: Chapman and Hall/CRC
• Year: 2019
• Leaves: 589
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This is a book about statistical distributions, their properties, and their application to modelling the dependence of the location, scale, and shape of the distribution of a response variable on explanatory variables. It will be especially useful to applied statisticians and data scientists in a wide range of application areas, and also to those interested in the theoretical properties of distributions. This book follows the earlier book ‘Flexible Regression and Smoothing: Using GAMLSS in R’, [Stasinopoulos et al., 2017], which focused on the GAMLSS model and software.　 GAMLSS (the Generalized Additive Model for Location, Scale, and Shape, [Rigby and Stasinopoulos, 2005]),　is a regression framework in which the response variable can have any parametric distribution and all the distribution parameters can be modelled as linear or smooth functions of explanatory variables. The current book focuses on distributions and their application.

Key features:

• Describes over 100 distributions, (implemented in the GAMLSS packages in R), including continuous, discrete and mixed distributions.

• Comprehensive summary tables of the properties of the distributions.

• Discusses properties of distributions, including skewness, kurtosis, robustness and an important classification of tail heaviness.

• Includes mixed distributions which are continuous distributions with additional specific values with point probabilities.

• Includes many real data examples, with R code integrated in the text for ease of understanding and replication.

• Supplemented by the gamlss website.

This book will be useful for applied statisticians and data scientists in selecting a distribution for a univariate response variable and modelling its dependence on explanatory variables, and to those interested in the properties of distributions.

✦ Table of Contents

Part I: Parametric distributions and the GAMLSS family of distributions

Types of distributions

Properties of distributions

The GAMLSS Family of Distributions

Continuous distributions on (−∞,∞)

Continuous distributions on (0, ∞)

Continuous distributions on (0, 1)

Discrete count distributions

Binomial type distributions

Mixed distributions

Part II: Advanced Topics

Statistical inference

Maximum likelihood estimation

Robustness of parameter estimation to outlier contamination

Methods of generating distributions

Discussion of skewness

Discussion of kurtosis

Skewness and kurtosis comparisons of continuous distributions

Heaviness of tails of distributions

Part III: Reference Guide

Continuous distributions on (−∞,∞)

Continuous distributions on (0, ∞)

Mixed distributions on [0 to ∞)

Continuous and mixed distributions on [0, 1]

Discrete count distributions

Binomial type distributions and multinomial distributions

Appendices