A new goodness of fit test for multivariate normality and comparative simulation study

Abstract

The testing of multivariate normality remains a significant scientific problem. Although it is being extensively researched, it is still unclear how to choose the best test based on the sample size, variance, covariance matrix and others. In order to contribute to this field, a new goodness of fit test for multivariate normality is introduced. This test is based on the mean absolute deviation of the empirical distribution density from the theoretical distribution density. A new test was compared with the most popular tests in terms of empirical power. The power of the tests was estimated for the selected alternative distributions and examined by the Monte Carlo modeling method for the chosen sample sizes and dimensions. Based on the modeling results, it can be concluded that a new test is one of the most powerful tests for checking multivariate normality, especially for smaller samples. In addition, the assumption of normality of two real data sets was checked.