A Bayesian-Weighted Inverse Gaussian Regression Model with Application to Seismological Data

Abstract

Developing an efficient model for analyzing right-skewed positive observations has a long history, and many authors have attempt in this direction. This is because the common analytic modeling procedures such as linear regression are often inappropriate for such data and leads to inadequate results. In this article, we proposed a new model for regression analysis of the right-skewed data by assuming the weighted inverse Gaussian, as a great flexible distribution, for response observations. In the proposed model, the complementary reciprocal of the location parameter of response variable is considered to be a linear function of the explanatory variables. We developed a fully Bayesian framework to infer about the model parameters based on a general noninformative prior structure and employed a Gibbs sampler to derive the posterior inferences by using the Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. A comparative simulation study is worked out to assess and compare the proposed model with other usual competitor models, and it is observed that efficiency is quite satisfactory. A real seismological data set is also analyzed to explain the applicability of the proposed Bayesian model and to access its performance. The results indicate to the more accuracy of proposed regression model in estimation of model parameters and prediction of future observations in comparison to its usual competitors in literature. Particularly, the relative prediction efficiency of the proposed regression model to the inverse Gaussian and log-normal regression models has been obtained to be 1.16 and 64, respectively, for the real-world example discussed in this paper.