On cross-validated estimation of skew normal model

Abstract

Skew normal model suffers from inferential drawbacks, namely singular Fisher information when it is close to symmetry and diverging of maximum likelihood estimation. This causes a large variation of the conventional maximum likelihood estimate. To address the above drawbacks, Azzalini and Arellano-Valle (2013) introduced maximum penalised likelihood estimation (MPLE) by subtracting a penalty function from the log-likelihood function with a pre-specified penalty coefficient. Here, we propose a cross-validated MPLE to improve its performance when the underlying model is close to symmetry. We develop a theory for MPLE, where an asymptotic rate for the cross-validated penalty coefficient is derived. We further show that the proposed cross-validated MPLE is asymptotically efficient under certain conditions. In simulation studies and a real data application, we demonstrate that the proposed estimator can outperform the conventional MPLE when the model is close to symmetry.