Detecting simultaneous shifts in location and scale between two populations is a common challenge in statistical inference, particularly in fields like biomedicine where right-skewed data distributions are prevalent. The classical Lepage test, which combines the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney and Ansari-Bradley tests, can be suboptimal under these conditions due to its restrictive assumptions of equal variances and medians. This study systematically evaluates enhanced Lepage-type test statistics that incorporate modern robust components for improved performance with right-skewed data. We combine the Fligner-Policello test and Fong-Huang variance estimator for the location component with a novel empirical variance estimator for the Ansari-Bradley scale component, relaxing assumptions of equal variances and medians. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations across exponential, gamma, chi-square, lognormal, and Weibull distributions demonstrate that tests incorporating both robust components achieve power
Simplicia-simplicial regression concerns statistical modeling scenarios in which both the predictors and the responses are vectors constrained to lie on the simplex. Fiksel et al. (2022) introduced a transformationfree linear regression framework for this setting, wherein the regression coefficients are estimated by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the observed and fitted compositions, using an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for optimization. In this work, we reformulate the problem as a constrained logistic regression model, in line with the methodological perspective of Tsagris (2025), and we obtain parameter estimates via constrained iteratively reweighted least squares. Simulation results indicate that the proposed procedure substantially improves computational efficiency-yielding speed gains ranging from 6×−−326×-while providing estimates that closely approximate those obtained from the EM-based approach.
Compositional data–vectors of non-negative components summing to unity–frequently arise in scientific applications where covariates influence the relative proportions of components, yet traditional regression approaches face challenges regarding the unit-sum constraint and zero values. This paper revisits the α–regression framework, which uses a flexible power transformation parameterized by α to interpolate between raw data analysis and log-ratio methods, naturally handling zeros without imputation while allowing data-driven transformation selection. We formulate α–regression as a non-linear least squares problem, study its asymptotic properties, provide efficient estimation via the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm, and derive marginal effects for interpretation.
Simplicial-simplicial regression refers to the regression setting where both the responses and predictor variables lie within the simplex space, i.e. they are compositional. For this setting, constrained least squares, where the regression coefficients themselves lie within the simplex, is proposed. The model is transformation-free but the adoption of a power transformation is straightforward, it can treat more than one compositional datasets as predictors and offers the possibility of weights among the simplicial predictors. Among the model’s advantages are its ability to treat zeros in a natural way and a highly computationally efficient algorithm to estimate its coefficients. Resampling based hypothesis testing procedures are employed regarding inference, such as linear independence, and equality of the regression coefficients to some pre-specified values. The performance of the proposed technique and its comparison to an existing methodology that is of the same spirit takes place u
In this paper, we propose a modified formulation of the principal components analysis, based on the use of a multivariate Cauchy likelihood instead of the Gaussian likelihood, which has the effect of robustifying the principal components. We present an algorithm to compute these robustified principal components. We additionally derive the relevant influence function of the first component and examine its theoretical properties.
Two new distributions are proposed: the circular projected and the spherical projected Cauchy distributions. A special case of the circular projected Cauchy coincides with the wrapped Cauchy distribution, and for this, a generalization is suggested that offers better fit via the inclusion of an extra parameter. For the spherical case, by imposing two conditions on the scatter matrix we end up with an elliptically symmetric distribution.
Compositional data arise in many real-life applications and versatile methods for properly analyzing this type of data in the regression context are needed. When parametric assumptions do not hold or are difficult to verify, non-parametric regression models can provide a convenient alternative method for prediction. To this end, we consider an extension to the classical k-NN regression, termed a-k-NN regression, that yields a highly flexible non-parametric regression model for compositional data through the use of the a-transformation.
We compared maximum likelihood and the k-NN algorithm in the context of discriminant analysis with spherical data.
Discriminant analysis for spherical data, or directional data in general, has not been extensively studied, and most papers focus on one distribution, the von Mises-Fisher. In this work, we study more distributions, escaping the rotational symmetry bound of the aforementioned distribution and also include a non parametric classier, the k-NN algorithm.
A folded type model is developed for analyzing compositional data based that provides a new and flexible class of distributions for modeling data defined on the simplex sample space. Despite its rather seemingly complex structure, employment of the EM algorithm guarantees efficient parameter estimation.
We present a new model for analyzing compositional data with structural zeros. Inspired by \cite{butler2008} who suggested a model in the presence of zero values in the data we propose a model that treats the zero values in a different manner. Instead of projecting every zero value towards a vertex, we project them onto their corresponding edge and fit a zero-censored multivariate model.
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