1. Introduction
The skew-t distribution can be constructed from two independent random variables. Let
follow a standard skew-normal distribution with shape parameter
, whose probability density function is
(1)
where
and
denote the probability density function and cumulative distribution function of the standard normal distribution, respectively.
Let
be independent of
and follow a chi-squared distribution with
degrees of freedom, that is,
. Define
. Then,
follows a skew-t distribution with degrees of freedom parameter
and shape parameter
, denoted by
. Its probability density function is
(2)
where
is the probability density function (PDF) of the standard Student’s t-distribution with
degrees of freedom, and
is the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the standard Student’s t-distribution with
degrees of freedom. It is also noteworthy that the PDF of the standard Student’s t-distribution
can be expressed in the form:
(3)
where
, and
is the gamma function.
Let
be a sequence of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variables with the skew-t distribution
, and denote
be the partial maximum of
. Padoan [1] proved that
(4)
with the normalizing constants
(5)
Peng and Nadarajah derived the higher-order asymptotic expansions of the maximum of the skew-t distribution [2]; Liao and Weng explored the joint distribution of the maximum and minimum of the skew-normal distribution [3]; Lu and Guo obtained the higher-order asymptotic expansions of the range of the general error distribution [4]; Zhang and Lu derived the higher-order asymptotic expansions of the range of the skew-normal distribution [5]. However, the joint distribution and higher-order asymptotic expansions of the range of the skew-t distribution still remain unexplored currently.
The rest of this article is arranged as follows. Section 2 establishes the higher-order asymptotic expansions of the range of the skew-t distribution. Section 3 presents some lemmas required in the proof process. Section 4 provides the proof of the theorem. Section 5 presents the numerical simulations, and Section 6 gives the conclusions.
2. Main Results
In this section, we provide the main results concerning the limiting distribution of the sample range
from the skew-t distribution
and its higher-order expansions. First, we give the limiting distribution of the normalized
with the normalizing constants.
Theorem 2.1. Let
be a sequence of i.i.d. random variables with common skew-t distribution
, where
and
. Denote
and
. For every fixed
, then we have
where
.
To establish the higher-order expansions of the normalized sample range from the skew-t distribution, we define
The following Theorems give the second-order expansions and the third-order expansions by considering different values of
, respectively.
Theorem 2.2. Let
be a sequence of i.i.d. random variables with a common skew-t distribution
, where
and
. For every fixed
, we have
1) If
,
where
(6)
2) If
,
where
(7)
3) If
,
where
(8)
Theorem 2.3. Let
be a sequence of i.i.d. random variables with a common skew-t distribution
, for every fixed
, we have
1) If
,
where
(9)
2) If
,
where
(10)
3) If
,
where
(11)
4) If
,
where
(12)
5) If
,
where
(13)
6) If
,
where
(14)
7) If
,
where
(15)
3. Lemmas
In order to prove the main results, we need to take
where
,
are given.
The proof of the main results is based on the integral representation of the sample range. After normalization, the integrand consists of two components: a density term associated with the sample minimum and a power of an interval probability requiring all remaining observations to lie within a range of length
. Lemma 3.1 derives the higher-order expansion of the interval-probability component, while Lemma 3.2 derives the corresponding expansion of the density component. Their products generate the correction terms appearing in Theorems 2.1 - 2.3.
Lemma 3.1. Let
be the skew-t distribution with parameter
. For every fixed
and
,
1) If
, we have
(16)
2) If
, we have
(17)
3) If
, we have
(18)
4) If
, we have
(19)
5) If
, we have
(20)
6) If
, we have
(21)
7) If
, we have
(22)
Proof. 1) If
, it follows from Nadarajah and for large enough
that let
denote the cdf of the skew-t distribution [2]. For large
, we have
(23)
where
(24)
(25)
we have
(26)
where
(27)
(28)
hence
(29)
Similar to finding the maximum value distribution, we can find a normalization constant
such that
with the normalizing constant
(30)
And it follows from Fung and Seneta that the following expansion for the lower tail of skew-t distribution [6]:
where
(31)
(32)
we have
(33)
where
(34)
(35)
Note tat
(36)
Hence, combining (29), (33), and (36), we can draw a conclusion.
2) If
, we have
(37)
(38)
where
(39)
Hence, combining (36), (37), and (38), we can draw a conclusion.
3) If
, we have
(40)
(41)
Hence, combining (36), (40), and (41), we can draw a conclusion.
4) If
, we have
(42)
(43)
Hence, combining (36), (42), and (43), we can draw a conclusion.
5) If
, we have
(44)
(45)
Hence, combining (36), (44), and (45), we can draw a conclusion.
6) If
, we have
(46)
(47)
Hence, combining (36), (46), and (47), we can draw a conclusion. □
7) If
, we have
(48)
(49)
Hence, combining (36), (48), and (49), we can draw a conclusion.
Lemma 3.2. Let
be the probability density function of the skew-t distribution with parameter
. For
and large enough
, with normalizing constant
and
, we have
(50)
Proof. Recall that the density function of the skew-t distribution is
where
is the PDF of the standard Student’s
distribution with degree of freedom
, and
is the CDF of the standard Student’s
distribution with degree of freedom
.
Let
with
, and define
Since
we obtain
Set
and
. Then
Now expand
about
by Taylor’s theorem:
The derivatives are
because
. Substituting
and collecting terms up to
yields
From
, direct binomial expansion gives
Since
,
implies
. Multiplying these two expansions and retaining terms up to
, we obtain
By the definition of
, we have
Hence
Multiplying it by this factor and dividing the bracket by
, we get proved. □
Role of the Lemmas and Proof Strategy
To clarify the role of the preceding expansions, we briefly describe the probabilistic structure underlying the proofs. For a continuous distribution function
with density
, the sample range satisfies
we obtain
where
and
The factor
represents the density contribution associated with placing one observation, which becomes the sample minimum, near the normalized location
. Conditional on this location,
is the probability that the remaining
observations all lie in the interval
, whose length is
.
Thus, the two factors describe, respectively, the location of the minimum and the requirement that the entire sample be contained in an interval of the prescribed length. On the effective domain, we have
and
. Lemma 3.1 provides the required expansion of
by combining the lower-tail probability at
, the upper-tail probability at
, and the logarithmic expansion of the power
. Lemma 3.2 provides the corresponding expansion of the density factor
.
The leading product of the two lemmas yields the limiting distribution in Theorem 2.1. Their first nonvanishing correction terms yield the second-order expansions in Theorem 2.2, and the next correction terms, including the cross-products between the two factors, yield the third-order expansions in Theorem 2.3. The separate cases in
arise from the competition among the orders
The values
are critical because two different sources of error become of the same order at these values.
4. Proofs
4.1. Proof of Theorem 2.1
Proof. Let
be the density function of
, and we have
we denote
be the density function of
then
. Therefore, we can obtain that
It follows from the dominated convergence theorem, Lemma 3.1, and Lemma 3.2 that
The proof is finished. □
4.2. Proof of Theorem 2.2
Proof. 1) If
, from (20) - (22) and (50), according to the dominated convergence theorem, we have
(51)
where
is given in (8).
2) If
, similarly, from (19) and (50), according to the dominated convergence theorem, we have
(52)
where
is given in (7).
3) If
, similarly, from (16) - (18) and (50), according to the dominated convergence theorem, we have
(53)
where
is given in (6). The proof is finished. □
4.3. Proof of Theorem 2.3
Proof. Note that the normalizing constants
and
, similar to the proof of Theorem 2.2:
Recall that
1) If
, by (16), (50), and (53) again, we have
where
is given in (9).
2) If
, similarly, by (17), (50), and (53) again, we have
where
is given in (10).
3) If
, similarly, by (18), (50), and (53) again, we have
where
is given in (11).
4) If
, similarly, by (19), (50), and (52) again, we have
where
is given in (12).
5) If
, similarly, by (20), (50), and (51) again, we have
where
is given in (13).
6) If
, similarly, by (21), (50), and (51) again, we have
where
is given in (14).
7) If
, similarly, by (22), (50), and (51) again, we have
where
is given in (15).
The proof is completed. □
5. Numerical Simulation
Let
be independent and identically distributed random variables following a skew-t distribution with degrees of freedom
and skewness parameter
,
The sample range is defined as
where
and
The objective is to investigate the asymptotic behavior of the normalized sample range
According to the extreme value theory developed in previous sections, the normalized sample range satisfies
where
denotes the first-order limiting distribution.
To investigate the finite-sample accuracy, higher-order expansions are considered. The second-order approximation is expressed as
where
represents the second-order correction term.
Furthermore, the third-order approximation is given by
The purpose of the numerical experiment is to examine whether these higher-order correction terms can improve the approximation accuracy for finite sample sizes.
5.1. Simulation Settings
The parameters used in the simulation are chosen as
The choice
corresponds to a heavy-tailed case, while
represents a strongly skewed distribution.
Three different sample sizes are considered:
For each sample size, Monte Carlo samples are generated, and the empirical distribution is calculated as
The empirical distribution is then compared with the theoretical approximations of different orders.
5.2. First-Order Approximation
The first-order approximation is given by
Figure 1 shows the comparison between the theoretical first-order limiting distribution and the empirical distributions for different sample sizes.
Figure 1. First-order convergence of the normalized sample range under the skew-t distribution with
and
.
It can be observed that the empirical curves approach the theoretical limit as the sample size increases.
For
, the empirical distribution already provides a close approximation to the limiting curve. With increasing sample size, the difference between simulation results and theoretical approximation remains very small.
The sample range absolute errors are summarized below.
As shown in Table 1, the results demonstrate that the first-order asymptotic distribution captures the limiting behavior of the skew-t sample range statistic.
Table 1. Sample range absolute errors of the first-order approximation.
|
Error |
1000 |
|
5000 |
|
10,000 |
|
5.3. Second-Order Approximation
To improve the finite-sample accuracy, the second-order correction term is incorporated.
The corresponding approximation is
The simulation results are presented in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Second-order convergence of the normalized sample range under the skew-t distribution with
and
.
The comparison shows that the second-order expansion does not provide a more accurate approximation than the first-order limit, especially in the tail region.
The errors obtained from simulations are listed below.
As shown in Table 2, although the correction term becomes smaller when
increases, the second-order expansion successfully describes the finite-sample deviation from the limiting distribution.
Table 2. Errors of first-order and second-order approximations.
|
First-Order |
Second-Order |
1000 |
|
|
5000 |
|
|
10,000 |
|
|
5.4. Third-Order Approximation
To further improve the approximation accuracy, the third-order correction is introduced.
The third-order expansion is
Figure 3 presents the simulation results.
Figure 3. Third-order convergence of the normalized sample range under the skew-t distribution with
and
.
This indicates that the higher-order correction terms effectively capture the remaining finite-sample bias.
The numerical errors are summarized as shown in Table 3:
Table 3. Errors of first-order and third-order approximations.
|
First-Order |
Third-Order |
1000 |
|
|
5000 |
|
|
10,000 |
|
|
5.5. Discussion
The simulation results show that the approximations from the first-order expansion, second-order expansion, and third-order expansion are all close to the actual values. However, since the second-order correction and third-order correction do not significantly improve the approximation for this sample size, it cannot be concluded that the third-order approximation is significantly superior.
6. Conclusions and Discussion
In this paper, we have developed a higher-order asymptotic theory for the extreme behavior of the skew-t distribution. By carefully analyzing its tail properties, we obtained the first-order limiting distribution as well as explicit second-order correction and third-order correction terms for the normalized sample range statistic. The theoretical derivations themselves constitute a significant mathematical contribution, providing a systematic analytical tool for extreme-value problems involving asymmetric heavy-tailed distributions.
Numerical simulations confirm the correctness of the theoretical derivations, with empirical curves gradually approaching the respective asymptotic forms as the sample size increases. However, it is noteworthy that, under the sample sizes and parameter settings considered in this study, the second- and third-order corrections do not exhibit a significant improvement over the classical first-order approximation. This finding suggests that the advantage of higher-order expansions is likely conditional, and their gains may only emerge at substantially larger sample sizes or at more extreme tail quantiles. Consequently, when applying these expansions in practice, the choice of expansion order should be carefully weighed against the specific sample size and tail region of interest.
Several limitations of this study should also be acknowledged. First, the current framework relies on the independent and identically distributed assumption and does not account for dependence or temporal clustering commonly encountered in real data. Second, the complexity of the correction terms increases rapidly with the expansion order, which may hinder their direct use in large-scale numerical procedures. Third, the empirical analysis is primarily simulation-based, and further validation using real-world extreme-event datasets is needed to assess practical applicability.
Future research may proceed along several directions. One possible extension is to generalize the proposed higher-order framework to dependent skew-t sequences, including time series and spatial processes. Another promising direction is to examine whether the correction methodology can be extended to other skewed heavy-tailed distributions or more flexible distribution families. Additionally, developing more efficient computational algorithms for evaluating higher-order terms would enhance the practical utility of the proposed approach.
In summary, although this study does not establish the universal superiority of higher-order expansions over the first-order approximation in all finite-sample settings, its systematic theoretical development and the numerical insight into the applicability boundaries of higher-order terms provide a valuable foundation for refined extreme-value analysis in asymmetric heavy-tailed contexts, and offer clear guidelines for future investigations.