An Interpolating Family of Size Distributions

Abstract: We introduce a new five-parameter family of size distributions on the semi-finite interval $[x_0, \infty), x_0 \geqslant 0$, with two attractive features. First, it interpolates between power laws, such as the Pareto distribution, and power laws with exponential cut-off, such as the Weibull distribution. The proposed family is thus very flexible and spans over a broad range of well-known size distributions which are special cases of our family. Second, it has important tractability advantages over the popular five-parameter Generalized Beta distribution. We derive the hazard function, survival function, modes and quantiles, propose a random number generation procedure and discuss maximum likelihood estimation issues. Finally, we illustrate the wide applicability and fitting capacities of our new model on basis of three real data sets from very diverse domains, namely actuarial science, environmental science and survival analysis.