# Tag Info

67

The gamma has a property shared by the lognormal; namely that when the shape parameter is held constant while the scale parameter is varied (as is usually done when using either for models), the variance is proportional to mean-squared (constant coefficient of variation). Something approximate to this occurs fairly often with financial data, or indeed, with ...

52

The (right) tail of a distribution describes its behavior at large values. The correct object to study is not its density--which in many practical cases does not exist--but rather its distribution function $F$. More specifically, because $F$ must rise asymptotically to $1$ for large arguments $x$ (by the Law of Total Probability), we are interested in how ...

46

First, combine any sums having the same scale factor: a $\Gamma(n, \beta)$ plus a $\Gamma(m,\beta)$ variate form a $\Gamma(n+m,\beta)$ variate. Next, observe that the characteristic function (cf) of $\Gamma(n, \beta)$ is $(1-i \beta t)^{-n}$, whence the cf of a sum of these distributions is the product $$\prod_{j} \frac{1}{(1-i \beta_j t)^{n_j}}.$$ When ...

39

Jacobians--the absolute determinants of the change of variable function--appear formidable and can be complicated. Nevertheless, they are an essential and unavoidable part of the calculation of a multivariate change of variable. It would seem there's nothing for it but to write down a $k+1$ by $k+1$ matrix of derivatives and do the calculation. There's a ...

38

As for qualitative differences, the lognormal and gamma are, as you say, quite similar. Indeed, in practice they're often used to model the same phenomena (some people will use a gamma where others use a lognormal). They are both, for example, constant-coefficient-of-variation models (the CV for the lognormal is $\sqrt{e^{\sigma^2} -1}$, for the gamma it's ...

35

Both the gamma and Weibull distributions can be seen as generalisations of the exponential distribution. If we look at the exponential distribution as describing the waiting time of a Poisson process (the time we have to wait until an event happens, if that event is equally likely to occur in any time interval), then the $\Gamma(k, \theta)$ distribution ...

33

The log-linked gamma GLM specification is identical to exponential regression: $$E[y \vert x,z] = \exp \left( \alpha + \beta \cdot x +\gamma \cdot z \right)=\hat y$$ This means that $E[y \vert x=0,z=0]=\exp(\alpha)$. That's not a very meaningful value (unless you centered your variables to be be mean zero beforehand). There are at least three way to ...

32

The gamma and the lognormal are both right skew, constant-coefficient-of-variation distributions on $(0,\infty)$, and they're often the basis of "competing" models for particular kinds of phenomena. There are various ways to define the heaviness of a tail, but in this case I think all the usual ones show that the lognormal is heavier. (What the first person ...

31

That's a good question. In fact, why don't people use generalised linear models (GLM) more is also a good question. Warning note: Some people use GLM for general linear model, not what is in mind here. It does depend where you look. For example, gamma distributions have been popular in several of the environmental sciences for some decades and so ...

29

When you're considering simple parametric models for the conditional distribution of data (i.e. the distribution of each group, or the expected distribution for each combination of predictor variables), and you are dealing with a positive continuous distribution, the two common choices are Gamma and log-Normal. Besides satisfying the specification of the ...

25

An alternative is the approach of Kooperberg and colleagues, based on estimating the density using splines to approximate the log-density of the data. I'll show an example using the data from @whuber's answer, which will allow for a comparison of approaches. set.seed(17) x <- rexp(1000) You'll need the logspline package installed for this; install it if ...

23

One solution, borrowed from approaches to edge-weighting of spatial statistics, is to truncate the density on the left at zero but to up-weight the data that are closest to zero. The idea is that each value $x$ is "spread" into a kernel of unit total area centered at $x$; any part of the kernel that would spill over into negative territory is removed and ...

22

Imagine you're the newly appointed manager of a flower shop. You've got a record of last year's customers – the frequency with which they shop and how long since their last visit. You want to know how much business the listed customers are likely to bring in this year. There are a few things to consider: [assumption (ii)] Customers have different shopping ...

21

Well, quite clearly the log-linear fit to the Gaussian is unsuitable; there's strong heteroskedasticity in the residuals. So let's take that out of consideration. What's left is lognormal vs gamma. Note that the histogram of $T$ is of no direct use, since the marginal distribution will be a mixture of variates (each conditioned on a different set of values ...

20

As Prof. Sarwate's comment noted, the relations between squared normal and chi-square are a very widely disseminated fact - as it should be also the fact that a chi-square is just a special case of the Gamma distribution: $$X \sim N(0,\sigma^2) \Rightarrow X^2/\sigma^2 \sim \mathcal \chi^2_1 \Rightarrow X^2 \sim \sigma^2\mathcal \chi^2_1= \text{Gamma}\left(\... 20 This one (maybe surprisingly) can be done with easy elementary operations (employing Richard Feynman's favorite trick of differentiating under the integral sign with respect to a parameter). We are supposing X has a \Gamma(\alpha,\beta) distribution and we wish to find the expectation of Y=\log(X). First, because \beta is a scale parameter, its ... 19 The answer by @whuber is quite nice; I will essentially restate his answer in a more general form which connects (in my opinion) better with statistical theory, and which makes clear the power of the overall technique. Consider a family of distributions \{F_\theta : \theta \in \Theta\} which consitute an exponential family, meaning they admit a density ... 18 Some background The \chi^2_n distribution is defined as the distribution that results from summing the squares of n independent random variables \mathcal{N}(0,1), so:$$\text{If }X_1,\ldots,X_n\sim\mathcal{N}(0,1)\text{ and are independent, then }Y_1=\sum_{i=1}^nX_i^2\sim \chi^2_n,$$where X\sim Y denotes that the random variables X and Y have ... 17 I used the gamma.shape function of MASS package as described by Balajari (2013) in order to estimate the shape parameter afterwards and then adjust coefficients estimations and predictions in the GLM. I advised you to read the lecture as it is, in my opinion, very clear and interesting concerning the use of gamma distribution in GLMs. glmGamma <- glm(... 17 \beta_1X \sim Gamma(\alpha_1, 1) and \beta_2 Y \sim Gamma(\alpha_2, 1), then according to Wikipedia$$\dfrac{\beta_1X}{\beta_2Y} \sim \text{Beta Prime distribution}(\alpha_1, \alpha_2). $$In addition, short hand you write \beta'(\alpha_1, \alpha_2). Now the Wiki page also describes the density of the general Beta-prime distribution \beta'(\alpha_1,... 16 Let us address the question posed, This is all somewhat mysterious to me. Is the normal distribution fundamental to the derivation of the gamma distribution...? No mystery really, it is simply that the normal distribution and the gamma distribution are members, among others of the exponential family of distributions, which family is defined by the ability to ... 16 The Welch–Satterthwaite equation could be used to give an approximate answer in the form of a gamma distribution. This has the nice property of letting us treat gamma distributions as being (approximately) closed under addition. This is the approximation in the commonly used Welch's t-test. (The gamma distribution is can be viewed as a scaled chi-square ... 16 Both the MLEs and moment based estimators are consistent and so you'd expect that in sufficiently large samples from a gamma distribution they'd tend to be quite similar. However, they won't necessarily be alike when the distribution is not close to a gamma. Looking at the distribution of the log of the data, it is roughly symmetric - or indeed actually ... 16 Residuals in glm's such as with the gamma family is not normally distributed, so simply a QQ plot against the normal distribution isn't very helpful. To understand this, note that the usual linear model given by$$ y_i = \beta_0 + \beta_1 x_1 + \dotso +\beta_p x_p + \epsilon $$has a very special form, the observation can be decomposed as an expected ... 15 Gamma regression is in the GLM and so you can get many useful quantities for diagnostic purposes, such as deviance residuals, leverages, Cook's distance, and so on. They are perhaps not as nice as the corresponding quantities for log-transformed data. One thing that gamma regression avoids compared to the lognormal is transformation bias. Jensen's ... 15 Question 1 The way you calculate the density by hand seems wrong. There's no need for rounding the random numbers from the gamma distribution. As @Pascal noted, you can use a histogram to plot the density of the points. In the example below, I use the function density to estimate the density and plot it as points. I present the fit both with the points and ... 15 I am guessing that you are looking for a positive, continuous probability distribution with infinite mean and with a maximum density away from zero. I thought that by analogy with a Gamma distribution (p(x) \propto x^a \exp(-x) \, dx), we could try something with a rational (polynomial) rather than an exponential tail. After a little bit of lazy R and ... 14 The usual gamma GLM contains the assumption that the shape parameter is constant, in the same way that the normal linear model assumes constant variance. In GLM parlance the dispersion parameter, \phi in \text{Var}(Y_i)=\phi\text{V}(\mu_i) is normally constant. More generally, you have a(\phi), but that doesn't help. It might perhaps be possible ... 14 Let's start with the p.d.f. of a gamma-distributed random variable X, where \alpha is the shape parameter and \beta is the rate parameter (the p.d.f. is a little bit different if \beta is a scale parameter; both parameters are strictly positive):$$ f_X(x) = \frac{x ^ {\alpha - 1} \beta ^ \alpha e ^ {-\beta x}}{\Gamma(\alpha)}  Now let \$\alpha = \...

14

Height, for instance, is often modelled as being normal. Maybe the height of men is something like 5 foot 10 with a standard deviation of 2 inches. We know negative height is unphysical, but under this model, the probability of observing a negative height is essentially zero. We use the model anyway because it is a good enough approximation. All models ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible