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. Then the Log-likelihood function is given by
$$\sum_{i=1}^{n}log(\frac{p(1-p)}{\sigma}\exp
{-\rho_{p}(\frac{y_i-\mu}{\sigma})})$$.
The scale parameter sigma
must be positive and non zero. The skew parameter p
must be between zero and one (0<p
<1).