Moments of mixtures

I needed to compute the higher moments of a mixture distribution for a project I’m working on. I’m writing up the code here in case anyone else finds this useful. (And in case I’ll find it useful in the future.) I’ll include the central moments first. From there it’s easy to compute skewness and kurtosis.

Suppose X is a mixture of n random variables X_i with weights w_i, non-negative numbers adding to 1. Then the jth central moment of X is given by

where μ_i is the mean of X_i.

In my particular application, I’m interested in a mixture of normals and so the code below computes the moments for a mixture of normals. It could easily be modified for other distributions.

from scipy.misc import factorialk, comb

def mixture_central_moment(mixture, moment):

    '''Compute the higher moments of a mixture of normal rvs.
    mixture is a list of (mu, sigma, weight) triples.
    moment is the central moment to compute.'''

    mix_mean = sum( w*m for (m, s, w) in mixture )

    mixture_moment = 0.0
    for triple in mixture:
        mu, sigma, weight = triple
        for k in range(moment+1):
            prod = comb(moment, k) * (mu-mix_mean)**(moment-k)
            prod *= weight*normal_central_moment(sigma, k)
            mixture_moment += prod

    return mixture_moment

def normal_central_moment(sigma, moment):

    '''Central moments of a normal distribution'''

    if moment % 2 == 1:
        return 0.0
    else:
        # If Z is a std normal and n is even, E(Z^n) == (n-1)!!
        # So E (sigma Z)^n = sigma^n (n-1)!!
        return sigma**moment * factorialk(moment-1, 2)

Once we have code for central moments, it’s simple to add code for computing skewness and kurtosis.

def mixture_skew(mixture):

    variance = mixture_central_moment(mixture, 2)
    third = mixture_central_moment(mixture, 3)
    return third / variance**(1.5)

def mixture_kurtosis(mixture):

    variance = mixture_central_moment(mixture, 2)
    fourth = mixture_central_moment(mixture, 4)
    return fourth / variance**2 - 3.0

Here’s an example of how the code might be used.

# Test on a mixture of 30% Normal(-2, 1) and 70% Normal(1, 3)
mixture = [(-2, 1, 0.3), (1, 3, 0.7)]

print "Skewness = ", mixture_skew(mixture)
print "Kurtosis = ", mixture_kurtosis(mixture)

Related post: General formula for normal moments