Master of Science / Department of Statistics / Weixing Song / A robust estimation procedure for parametric regression models is proposed in the paper by assuming the error terms follow a Pearson type VII distribution. The estimation procedure is implemented by an EM algorithm based on the fact that the Pearson type VII distributions are a scale mixture of a normal distribution and a Gamma distribution. A trimmed version of proposed procedure is also discussed in this paper, which can successfully trim the high leverage points away from the data. Finite sample performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by some extensive simulation studies, together with the comparisons made with other existing procedures in the literature.

Matrix variate skew elliptically contoured distributions generalize several classes of important distributions. This paper defines and explores matrix variate skew elliptically contoured distributions. In particular, we discuss two stochastic representations of the matrix variate skew elliptically contoured distributions.

We define and study multivariate and matrix variate skew Pearson type VII and skew t-distributions. We derive the marginal and conditional distributions, the linear transformation, and the stochastic representations of the multivariate and matrix variate skew Pearson type VII distributions and skew t-distributions. Also, we study the limiting distributions.

Matrix variate skew elliptically contoured distributions generalize several classes of important distributions. This paper defines and explores matrix variate skew elliptically contoured distributions. In particular, we discuss the first two moments of the matrix variate skew elliptically contoured distributions.