Multivariate Skew-Power-Normal Distributions: Properties and Associated Inference

The univariate power-normal distribution is quite useful for modeling many types of real data. On the other hand, multivariate extensions of this univariate distribution are not common in the statistic literature, mainly skewed multivariate extensions that can be bimodal, for example. In this paper, based on the univariate power-normal distribution, we extend the univariate power-normal distribution to the multivariate setup. Structural properties of the new multivariate distributions are established. We consider the maximum likelihood method to estimate the unknown parameters, and the observed and expected Fisher information matrices are also derived. Monte Carlo simulation results indicate that the maximum likelihood approach is quite effective to estimate the model parameters. An empirical application of the proposed multivariate distribution to real data is provided for illustrative purposes.