On properties of the bimodal skew-normal distribution and an application

Abstract

The main object of this paper is to develop an alternative construction for the bimodal skew-normal distribution. The construction is based upon a study of the mixture of skew-normal distributions. We study some basic properties of this family, its stochastic representations and expressions for its moments. Parameters are estimated using the maximum likelihood estimation method. A simulation study is carried out to observe the performance of the maximum likelihood estimators. Finally, we compare the efficiency of the new distribution with other distributions in the literature using a real data set. The study shows that the proposed approach presents satisfactory results.