On Mardia's and Song's measures of kurtosis in elliptical distributions

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is the calculation and the comparative study of two general measures of multivariate kurtosis, namely Mardia's measure β 2 , p and Song's measure S ( f ) . In this context, general formulas for the said measures are derived for the broad family of the elliptically contoured symmetric distributions and also for specific members of this family, like the multivariate t -distribution, the multivariate Pearson type II, the multivariate Pearson type VII, the multivariate symmetric Kotz type distribution and the uniform distribution in the unit sphere. Analytic expressions for computing Shannon and Rényi entropies are obtained under the elliptic family. The behaviour of Mardia's and Song's measures, their similarities and differences, possible interpretations and uses in practice are investigated by comparing them in specific members of the elliptic family of multivariate distributions. An empirical estimator of Song's measure is moreover proposed and its asymptotic distribution is investigated under the elliptic family of multivariate distributions.