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arXiv · 1605.00189

The Shapes of Things to Come: Probability Density Quantiles

Robert G. Staudte
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Abstract

For every discrete or continuous location-scale family having a square-integrable density, there is a unique continuous probability distribution on the unit interval that is determined by the density-quantile composition introduced by Parzen in 1979. These probability density quantiles (pdQs) only differ in shape, and can be usefully compared with the Hellinger distance or Kullback-Leibler divergences. Convergent empirical estimates of these pdQs are provided, which leads to a robust global fitting procedure of shape families to data. Asymmetry can be measured in terms of distance or divergence of pdQs from the symmetric class. Further, a precise classification of shapes by tail behavior can be defined simply in terms of pdQ boundary derivatives.

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Robert G. Staudte. 2016-05-01. The Shapes of Things to Come: Probability Density Quantiles. https://doi.org/10.1080/02331888.2016.1277225

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