Probability models are now a vital componentof every scienti c investigation. This book is intended to introduce basic ideas in stochastic modeling, with emphasis on models and techniques. These models lead to well-known parametric lifetime distributions, such as exponential, Weibull, and gamma distributions, as well as the change-point and mixture models. They also motivate us to consider more general notions of nonparametric lifetime distribution classes. Particular attention has been paid to their applications in reliability, insurance mathematics, and economics. The following topics are...

In multivariate statistical analysis, elliptical distributions have recently provided an alternative to the normal model. Most of the work, however, is spread out in journals throughout the world and is not easily accessible to the investigators. Fang, Kotz, and Ng presented a systematic study of multivariate elliptical distributions, however, they did not discuss the matrix variate case. Recently Fang and Zhang have summarized the results of generalized multivariate analysis which include vector as well as the matrix variate distributions. On the other hand, Fang and Anderson collected...