If mu
, sigma
or p
are not specified they assume the default values of 0, 1 and 0.5, respectively, belonging to the Symmetric Standard Laplace Distribution denoted by \(ALD(0,1,0.5)\).
As discussed in Koenker and Machado (1999) and Yu and Moyeed (2001) we say that a random variable
Y is distributed as an ALD with location parameter \(\mu\), scale parameter \(\sigma>0\) and skewness parameter \(p\) in (0,1), if its probability density function (pdf) is given by
$$f(y|\mu,\sigma,p)=\frac{p(1-p)}{\sigma}\exp
{-\rho_{p}(\frac{y-\mu}{\sigma})}$$
where \(\rho_p(.)\) is the so called check (or loss) function defined by
$$\rho_p(u)=u(p - I_{u<0})$$,
with \(I_{.}\) denoting the usual indicator function. This distribution is denoted by \(ALD(\mu,\sigma,p)\) and it's \(p\)th quantile is equal to \(\mu\). The scale parameter sigma
must be positive and non zero. The skew parameter p
must be between zero and one (0<p
<1).