I present various projects to study the halo dynamics of elliptical galaxies. This allows one to study the outer mass and orbital distributions of ellipticals in different environments, and the inner distributions of groups and clusters themselves.

The family of skew-symmetric distributions is a wide set of probability density functions obtained by suitably combining a few components which can be quite freely selected provided some simple requirements are satisfied. Although intense recent work has produced several results for certain sub-families of this construction, much less is known in general terms. The present paper explores some q...

This talk will be about a recently developed family of skew t distributions, their place in a wider setting of families of generalised order statistic distributions, and related miscellanea.

A novel numerical method to solve asymmetric adhesive contact problems in rectangular coordinates has been developed. Surface interaction is modelled using an interface potential, deformation is coupled using Green’s functions for a half space, and the resulting system of equations is solved by a relaxation technique. The method can handle arbitrary surface topography and properties. Compared w...

The goal of this paper is to propose efficient and adaptive regularized estimators for the nonparametric component, mean and covariance matrix in both high and fixed dimensional situations. Although, semiparametric estimation of elliptical distribution has also been discussed in [8], we wish to expand the model in two ways. First, study adaptive estimation methods with a novel scheme of estimat...

Classes of shape mixtures of independent and dependent multivariate skew-normal distributions are considered and some of their main properties are studied. If interpreted from a Bayesian point of view, the results obtained in this paper bring tractability to the problem of inference for the shape parameter, that is, the posterior distribution can be written in analytic form. Robust inference fo...

We explore extremal properties of a family of skewed distributions extended from the multivariate normal distribution by introducing a skewing function π . We give sufficient conditions on the skewing function for the pairwise asymptotic independence to hold. We apply our results to a special case of the bivariate skew-normal distribution and finally support our conclusions by a simulation stud...

In this paper, we propose finite mixtures of multivariate skew Laplace distributions to model both skewness and heavy-tailedness in the heterogeneous data sets. The maximum likelihood estimators for the parameters of interest are obtained by using the EM algorithm. We give a small simulation study and a real data example to illustrate the performance of the proposed mixture model.

We propose a flexible class of skew-symmetric distributions for which the probability density function has the form of a product of a symmetric density and a skewing function. By constructing an enumerable dense subset of skewing functions on a compact set, we are able to consider a family of distributions, which can capture skewness, heavy tails and multimodality systematically. We present thr...