Simple Distributions for Mixtures?

By arthur charpentier

The idea of GLMs is that given some covariates, has a distribution in the exponential family (Gaussian, Poisson, Gamma, etc). But that does not mean that has a similar distribution… so there is no reason to test for a Gamma model for before running a Gamma regression, for instance. But are there cases where it might work? That the non-conditional distribution is the same (same family at least) than the conditional ones?

For instance, if has a joint Gaussien distribution, then both marginals are Gaussian, but also . So, in that case, if the covariate is normally distributed, it is possible to have a Gaussian distribution also for . The econometric interpretation is that with a standard Gaussian linear model, if is normally distributed, not only the conditional distribution is Gaussian but also the non-conditional distribution of .

> set.seed(1)
> n=1e3
> X=rnorm(n,10,2)
> Y=1+3*X+rnorm(n)
> plot(X,Y,xlim=c(4,20))

Indeed, here the distribution of is also Gaussian

> library(nortest)
> ad.test(Y)

	Anderson-Darling normality test

data:  Y
A = 0.23155, p-value = 0.802

> shapiro.test(Y)

	Shapiro-Wilk normality test

data:  Y
W = 0.99892, p-value = 0.8293

(not only from a statistical point of view, the thoery of Gaussian random vectors confirms that the non-conditional distribution is Gaussian actually)

Here is continuous. What if we consider a finite mixture here, i.e. takes only a finite number of values? Actually, Teicher (1963) proved that it is not possible to have a non-conditional Gaussian distribution for . But in practice, would we really reject the Gaussian assumption, for ? If the number of classes is to small, yes. But with a large number of classes (a sufficiently large number of mixture components), …read more

Source:: r-bloggers.com