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Terezinha K. A. Ribeiro

Publications and source records attributed to Terezinha K. A. Ribeiro.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

A New Generalized Birnbaum-Saunders Regression Model: Inference, Diagnostics, and Applications

The Birnbaum-Saunders (BS) distribution has become a widely used model for positive and asymmetric continuous data. Several extensions of the BS distribution have been proposed, including regression formulations that relate its parameters to covariates. In this paper, we introduce a new regression model for the Generalized Birnbaum-Saunders (GBS) distribution, an extension that has received limited attention in the literature despite offering a stronger physical interpretation. The proposed framework follows the structure of Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale, and Shape (GAMLSS), allowing covariate effects to be incorporated into all three parameters of the distribution, thereby providing greater flexibility for modeling data. In particular, one of the model parameters has a direct interpretation as the median of the response variable, facilitating the interpretation of covariate effects on the conditional median. Parameter estimation is performed via maximum likelihood, and hypothesis tests are proposed based on the Wald test. The proposed regression model is implemented in R through the gamlss package, allowing access to a broad range of tools for model fitting, diagnostics, and assessment. Monte Carlo simulation studies are conducted to investigate the finite-sample performance of the maximum likelihood estimators. The results show that the estimators exhibit desirable properties, with bias decreasing and efficiency increasing as sample size grows. Additionally, the behavior of the Wald test is investigated, showing good performance for moderate to large sample sizes. Finally, two applications to real data illustrate the practical usefulness of the proposed GBS regression model, demonstrating that it is a flexible alternative for modeling positive and asymmetric data compared to the BS model

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A novel approach to generate distributions with applications to regression modeling

A novel approach to adding an additional parameter to a family of distributions for better adaptability has been put forth. This approach yields a versatile class of distributions supported on the positive real line. An important advantage of the proposed family is that the additional parameter admits a clear interpretation in terms of tail behavior, providing a simple mechanism for modulating tail heaviness. We proceed to analyze its mathematical characteristics, such as critical points, modality, stochastic representation, identifiability, quantiles, moments, and truncated moments. We present two new regression models for positive continuous data based on submodels of the newly proposed family of distributions, in which the distribution of the response variable is reparameterized in terms of the median. We use the maximum likelihood method to estimate the parameters, which was implemented through the gamlss package in R. The proposed regression models were applied to a real dataset, and their advantages over common alternative regression models were demonstrated through quantile residual analysis and information criteria.

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Robust estimation in beta regression via maximum Lq-likelihood

Beta regression models are widely used for modeling continuous data limited to the unit interval, such as proportions, fractions, and rates. The inference for the parameters of beta regression models is commonly based on maximum likelihood estimation. However, it is known to be sensitive to discrepant observations. In some cases, one atypical data point can lead to severe bias and erroneous conclusions about the features of interest. In this work, we develop a robust estimation procedure for beta regression models based on the maximization of a reparameterized Lq-likelihood. The new estimator offers a trade-off between robustness and efficiency through a tuning constant. To select the optimal value of the tuning constant, we propose a data-driven method which ensures full efficiency in the absence of outliers. We also improve on an alternative robust estimator by applying our data-driven method to select its optimum tuning constant. Monte Carlo simulations suggest marked robustness of the two robust estimators with little loss of efficiency. Applications to three datasets are presented and discussed. As a by-product of the proposed methodology, residual diagnostic plots based on robust fits highlight outliers that would be masked under maximum likelihood estimation.

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