In many real world problems, science fields such as biology, computer science, data mining, electrical and mechanical engineering, and signal processing, researchers aim to compare and classify several regression models. In this paper, a computational approach, based on the non-parametric methods, is used to investigate the similarities, and to classify several linear and non-linear regression models with symmetric errors. The ability of each given approach is then evaluated using simulated and real world practical datasets.

Vector Auto-regressive (VAR) models are commonly used for modelling multivariate time series and the typical distributional form is to assume a multivariate normal. However, the assumption of Gaussian white noise in multivariate time series is often not reasonable in applications where there are extreme and/or skewed observations. In this setting, inference based on using a Gaussian distributional form will provide misleading results. In this paper, we extended the multivariate setting of autoregressive process, by considering the multivariate scale mixture of skew-normal (SMSN) distributions for VAR innovations. The multivariate SMSN family is able to be represented in a hierarchical form which relatively easily facilitates simulation and an EM-type algorithm to estimate the model parameters. The performance of the proposed model is illustrated by using simulated and real datasets.

In this work, we study the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation problem for the parameters of the two-piece (TP) distribution based on the scale mixtures of normal (SMN) distributions. This is a family of skewed distributions that also includes the scales mixtures of normal class, and is flexible enough for modeling symmetric and asymmetric data. The ML estimates of the proposed model parameters are obtained via an expectation-maximization (EM)-type algorithm.

This article investigates maximum a-posteriori (MAP) estimation of autoregressive model parameters when the innovations (errors) follow a finite mixture of distributions that, in turn, are scale-mixtures of skew-normal distributions (SMSN), an attractive and extremely flexible family of probabilistic distributions. The proposed model allows to fit different types of data which can be associated with different noise levels, and provides a robust modelling with great flexibility to accommodate skewness, heavy tails, multimodality and stationarity simultaneously. Also, the existence of convenient hierarchical representations of the SMSN random variables allows us to develop an EM-type algorithm to perform the MAP estimates. A comprehensive simulation study is then conducted to illustrate the superior performance of the proposed method. The new methodology is also applied to annual barley yields data.