The skewness of mean–variance normal mixtures

Abstract

Mean–variance mixtures of normal distributions are very flexible: they model many nonnormal features, such as skewness, kurtosis and multimodality. Special cases include generalized asymmetric Laplace distributions, mixtures of two normal distributions with proportional covariance matrices, scale mixtures of normal distributions and normal distributions. This paper investigates the skewness of multivariate mean–variance normal mixtures. The special case of mixtures of two normal distributions with proportional covariance matrices is treated in greater detail. The paper derives the analytical forms of prominent measures of multivariate skewness and applies them to model-based clustering, normalizing linear transformations, projection pursuit and normality testing. The practical relevance of the theoretical results is assessed with both real and simulated data.