A Jarque-Bera type test for multivariate normality based on second-power skewness and kurtosis

Abstract

Desgagné and de Micheaux (2018) proposed an alternative univariate normality test to the Jarque-Bera test. The proposed statistic is based on the sample second power skewness and kurtosis while the Jarque-Bera statistic uses sample Pearson’s skewness and kurtosis that are the third and fourth standardized sample moments, respectively. In this paper, we generalize their statistic to a multivariate version based on orthogonalization or an empirical standardization of data. The proposed multivariate statistic follows chi-squared distribution approximately. A simulation study shows that the proposed statistic has good control of type I error even for a very small sample size when critical values from the approximate distribution are used. It has comparable power to the multivariate version of the Jarque-Bera test with exactly the same idea of the orthogonalization. It also shows much better power for some mixed normal alternatives.