Best Equivariant Estimator of Extreme Quantiles in the Multivariate Lomax Distribution ()
1. Introduction
In the analysis of income data, lifetime contexts, and business failure data the univariate Lomax (Pareto II) dis-
tribution with density
, is a useful model [1] . The lifetime of a decreasing failure rate
component may be describe by this distribution. It has been recommended by [2] as a heavy tailed alternative to the exponential distribution. The interested reader can see [3] and [4] for more details.
A multivariate generalization of the Lomax distribution has been proposed by [5] and studied by [6] . It may be obtained as a gamma mixture of independent exponential random variables in the following way. Consider a system of n components. It is then reasonable to suppose that the common operating environment shared by all components induces some kind of correlation among them. If for a given environment
, the component lifetimes
are independently exponentially distributed
with density
, and the changing nature of the environment is accounted by a distribution function
F(.), then the unconditional joint density of
is
(1)
where
. Furthermore, if
is a gamma distribution
with density
, then (1) become
(2)
This is called multivariate Lomax
with location parameter
and scale parameter
. The same distribution is referred to as Mardia’s multivariate Pareto II distribution, see [3] and [7] . If take
and assign a different scale parameter,
to each
we have
(3)
For more information about the work on this distribution, the reader can see [8] .
2. Best Affine Equivarient Estimator
Let
are from a multivariate Lomax distribution
with unknown
and
and known r. We consider the linear function
for given
. When
;
,
is the 100(1 − p) th quantile of the marginal distribution of
. Quantile estimation is of interest in reliability theory and lifetesting. [9] generalized results in [10] to a strictly Convex loss.
In this paper we consider the Linex loss function
(4)
where
is the shape parameter, which was introduced by [11] and was extensively used by [12] .
The minimal sufficient statistic in the model (2) is (S, X) where,
and
. Conditional on
,
random variable with
distribution, S and X are independent with
(5)
So, the density of (S, X) is
(6)
The problem of estimating
;
under the loss (4) is invariant under the affine group of transformations
and the equivariant estimator have the form δ = X + cS where c is a real constant.
Following [13] , we study scale equivariant estimators of the form
, where
and
is
a measurable function. Thus the equivariant estimator is of the form
, where
. Now, consider the risk of the estimator
for estimating
when the loss is (4).
(7)
Now, since
and
and
we have
(8)
which is finite if
. By the invariant property of the problem we can take
and the risk becomes
(9)
Differentiate the risk with respect to c and equating to zero, the minimizing c must satisfies the following equation
(10)
Yielding the best affine equivariant estimator
, where
.
3. Improved Estimator
For improving upon
, we study scale equivariant estimator
. The risk of
depends on ![]()
through
, so without loss of generality one can take
and write
(11)
The minimization of
leads to the following equation
(12)
let
, then the conditional density of S given
is proportional to
(13)
Consider now
and fix
, then setting
(14)
From (12) we compute the following expectations as follows
![]()
and
![]()
![]()
where
. Hence (12) becomes
(15)
any
satisfying (15) minimizes
, for
and
. Now, let ![]()
and fix again
, then
,
.
So we have
![]()
![]()
and
![]()
![]()
and hence (7) becomes
(16)
any
satisfying (16) minimizes
for
and
[14] . Now for deriving an improved equivariant estimator upon this we must find a bound for c in formula (15) and (16). As we can not derive c from Equations (15) and (16) explicitely, this would not be achieved.
Acknowledgements
The grant of Alzahra University is appreciated.