Heavy or semi-heavy tail, that is the question

Abstract

While there has been considerable research on the analysis of extreme values and outliers by using heavy-tailed distributions, little is known about the semi-heavy-tailed behaviors of data when there are a few suspicious outliers. To address the situation where data are skewed possessing semi-heavy tails, we introduce two new skewed distribution families of the hyperbolic secant with exciting properties. We extend the semi-heavy-tailedness property of data to a linear regression model. In particular, we investigate the asymptotic properties of the ML estimators of the regression parameters when the error term has a semi-heavy-tailed distribution. We conduct simulation studies comparing the ML estimators of the regression parameters under various assumptions for the distribution of the error term. We also provide three real examples to show the priority of the semi-heavy-tailedness of the error term comparing to heavy-tailedness. Online supplementary materials for this article are available. All the new proposed models in this work are implemented by the shs R package, which can be found on the GitHub webpage.