[R-SIG-Finance] Generating Distributions with set skewness and kurtosis

[Krishna Kumar]

Just to add to this the Johnson Family is simillar to the pearson family 
and is obtained by a simple transformation of the normal distribution.

The R package SuppDists has great support for the Johnson Distribution. 
In particular if you have a specific skew and kurtosis
 >require(SuppDists)
 >parms<-JohnsonFit(c(0,1,-0.2,4),moment="use")
 >hist(rJohnson(100,parms)

where the 0,1,-0.2,3  are respectively the  first four central moments 
of the distribution (mean ,variance etc)
The hist function above then shows you the skew in the resulting 
distribution.

Hope this helps,

Thanks
Kris






Matthew Clegg wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 11:53 AM,  <Matthias.Koberstein at hsbctrinkaus.de> wrote:
>   
>> Hello,
>>
>> I am reaching out to you for help since I am struggeling to find a function
>> to generate distributions with a set statistical properties as kurtosis and
>> skewdness.
>> Lets say I want to generate random variables following a "normal"
>> distribution, but with skewness 2 and kurtosis 5.
>> How would I do that, the most efficient way? Are there any packages for
>> that? I had a quick look but were only able to find packages which
>> calculate statistical
>> distribution properties after having the data.
>>
>> Thank you very much
>>
>> Matthias
>>
>>     
>
> The skewness and kurtosis of the normal distribution are fixed,
> but there are many continuous univariate distributions defined
> on the entire real line for which the skewness and kurtosis can be
> varied.
>
> One possible choice is the Pearson Type IV distribution.
> This distribution has the nice feature that the skewness and
> kurtosis can be easily formulated in terms of the distributional
> parameters (and vice versa).  The Wikipedia entry of the Pearson
> distributions is fairly informative:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_distribution
>
> Joel Heinrich has written up a nice implementation guide:
>
> http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/publications/cdf6820_pearson4.pdf
>
> The translation into R is fairly straightforward.
>
> There are many other options for distributions that allow for
> arbitrary skewness and kurtosis, but relating the parameters of the
> distribution to the skewness and kurtosis can be a challenge.
> If you are willing to resort to numerical methods to determine
> the skewness and kurtosis from the distributional parameters,
> here are a few choices.
>
> One easy option is the skewed-t distribution of Férnandez and Steel.
> See the "skewt" package by Robert King and Emily Anderson.  The
> Férnandez and Steel approach is elegant in that it provides a way to
> transform any symmetric continuous distribution into a skewed distribution.
> However, working out the exact skewness and kurtosis from the
> parameter values can be a challenge.
>
> As mentioned by John Frain, the stable distribution is a good
> choice when the tails are especially heavy.  See John Nolan's
> web site for a wealth of information:
>
> http://academic2.american.edu/~jpnolan/stable/stable.html
>
> For an R implementation, see Jim Lindsey's web page:
>
> http://popgen.unimaas.nl/~jlindsey/rcode.html
>
> (Also, although the stable distributions are skewed and
> heavy-tailed, the traditional definitions of skewness and kurtosis
> can't be applied to them, because the 2nd and higher moments
> are not defined.)
>
> On the other hand, if you are interested in a distribution that
> has thinner tails than the normal, you might want to consider
> the skew GED distribution.  See Diethelm Wuertz's fGarch
> package:
>
> http://www.rmetrics.org
>
> This package also contains implementations of skew normal
> and skew student-t distributions, again using Férnandez and
> Steel's approach.
>
> The normal inverse Gaussian, and its cousin the generalized
> hyperbolic distribution, has received a fair amount of recent
> attention.  I believe an implementation can be found in the
> "ghyp" package of Wolfgang Breymann and David Luethi.
>
> This does not by any means exhaust the space of possibilities,
> but it should at least give you a start.
>
> BTW, here are a few R functions that will help you to explore
> the skewness and kurtosis of arbitrary distributions:
>
> # Calculate mean of an arbitrary density
> Mean <- function(f, ...) { integrate(function (x) { f(x, ...) * x },
> -Inf, Inf)$value }
> # Calculate k-th central moment of an arbitrary density
> M <- function (f, ..., k=1, xm = Mean(f, ...)) { integrate(function(x)
> {(x - xm)^k*f(x,...)}, -Inf, Inf)$value }
> # Calculate skewness of an arbitrary density
> SK <- function(f, ...) { M(f, ..., k=3) / (M(f, ..., k=2)^1.5) }
> # Calculate excess kurtosis of an arbitrary density
> KU <- function(f, ...) { M(f, ..., k=4) / (M(f, ..., k=2)^2) - 3}
>
>   
>> SK(dnorm)
>>     
> [1] 0   # normal distribution has skewness of 0
>   
>> KU(dnorm)
>>     
> [1] 1.625367e-13  # good enough for government work
>
> # Test gamma distribution with shape=1
>   
>> Mean(dgamma, 1)
>>     
> [1] 1  # good
>   
>> SK(dgamma, 1)
>>     
> [1] 2  # good
>   
>> KU(dgamma, 1)
>>     
> [1] 6  # good
>
>   
>> library(skewt)
>> KU(dskt, 5, 1)
>>     
> [1] 6   # Agrees with theory ... skewness of t with 5 d.f. should be 6
>   
>> SK(dskt, 5, 1.5)
>>     
> [1] 1.516366
>   
>> SK(dskt, 5, 1/1.5)
>>     
> [1] -1.516366
>
>
>