Skewed Pivot-Blend Modeling with Applications to Semicontinuous Outcomes

Abstract: Skewness is a common occurrence in statistical applications. In recent years, various distribution families have been proposed to model skewed data by introducing unequal scales based on the median or mode. However, we argue that the point at which unbalanced scales occur may be at any quantile and cannot be reparametrized as an ordinary shift parameter in the presence of skewness. In this paper, we introduce a novel skewed pivot-blend technique to create a skewed density family based on any continuous density, even those that are asymmetric and nonunimodal. Our framework enables the simultaneous estimation of scales, the pivotal point, and other location parameters, along with various extensions. We also introduce a skewed two-part model tailored for semicontinuous outcomes, which identifies relevant variables across the entire population and mitigates the additional skewness induced by commonly used transformations. Our theoretical analysis reveals the influence of skewness without assuming asymptotic conditions. Experiments on synthetic and real-life data demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed method.