BAYESIAN HIERARCHICAL MODEL WITH SKEWED ELLIPTICAL DISTRIBUTION

Meta-analysis refers to quantitative methods for combining results from independent studies in order to draw overall conclusions. We consider hierarchical models including selection models under a skewed heavy tailed error distribution proposed originally by Chen et al. (1999) and Branco and Dey (2001). These rich classes of models combine the information of independent studies, allowing investigation of variability both between and within studies, and incorporate weight function. Here, the testing for the skewness parameter is discussed. The score test statistic for such a test can be shown to be expressed as the posterior expectations. Also, we consider the detail computational scheme under skewed normal and skewed Student-t distribution using MCMC method. Finally, we introduce one example from Johnson (1993)'s real data and apply our proposed methodology. We investigate sensitivity of our results under different skewed errors and under different prior distributions.