An analysis of multivariate measures of skewness and kurtosis of skew-elliptical distributions

Abstract: This paper examines eight measures of skewness and Mardia measure of kurtosis for skew-elliptical distributions. Multivariate measures of skewness considered include Mardia, Malkovich-Afifi, Isogai, Song, Balakrishnan-Brito-Quiroz, M$\acute{o}$ri, Rohatgi and Sz$\acute{e}$kely, Kollo and Srivastava measures. We first study the canonical form of skew-elliptical distributions, and then derive exact expressions of all measures of skewness and kurtosis for the family of skew-elliptical distributions, except for Song's measure. Specifically, the formulas of these measures for skew normal, skew $t$, skew logistic, skew Laplace, skew Pearson type II and skew Pearson type VII distributions are obtained. Next, as in Malkovich and Afifi (1973), test statistics based on a random sample are constructed for illustrating the usefulness of the established results. In a Monte Carlo simulation study, different measures of skewness and kurtosis for $2$-dimensional skewed distributions are calculated and compared. Finally, real data is analyzed to demonstrate all the results.