A Special Weight for Inverse Gaussian Mixing Distribution in Normal Variance Mean Mixture with Application

Normal Variance-Mean Mixture (NVMM) provides a general framework for deriving models with desirable properties for modelling financial market variables such as exchange rates, equity prices, and interest rates measured over short time intervals, i.e. daily or weekly. Such data sets are characterized by non-normality and are usually skewed, fat-tailed and exhibit excess kurtosis. The Generalised Hyperbolic distribution (GHD) introduced by Barndorff-Nielsen (1977) which act as Normal variance-mean mixtures with Generalised Inverse Gaussian (GIG) mixing distribution nest a number of special and limiting case distributions. The Normal Inverse Gaussian (NIG) distribution is obtained when the Inverse Gaussian is the mixing distribution, i.e., the index parameter of the GIG is . The NIG is very popular because of its analytical tractability. In the mixing mechanism, the mixing distribution characterizes the prior information of the random variable of the conditional distribution. Therefore, considering finite mixture models is one way of extending the work. The GIG is a three parameter distribution denoted by and nest several special and limiting cases. When , we have which is called an Inverse Gaussian (IG) distribution. When , , , we have , and distributions respectively. These distributions are related to and are called weighted inverse Gaussian distributions. In this work, we consider a finite mixture of and and show that the mixture is also a weighted Inverse Gaussian distribution and use it to construct a NVMM. Due to the complexity of the likelihood, direct maximization is difficult. An EM type algorithm is provided for the Maximum Likelihood estimation of the parameters of the proposed model. We adopt an iterative scheme which is not based on explicit solution to the normal equations. This subtle approach reduces the computational difficulty of solving the complicated quantities involved directly to designing an iterative scheme based on a representation of the normal equation. The algorithm is easily programmable and we obtained a monotonic convergence for the data sets used.