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Multivariate stable distribution

Concept in probability theory

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Source updated September 9, 2025

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The multivariate stable distribution is a multivariate probability distribution that is a multivariate generalisation of the univariate stable distribution. The multivariate stable distribution defines linear relations between stable distribution marginals. In the same way as for the univariate case, the distribution is defined in terms of its characteristic function.

The multivariate stable distribution can also be thought as an extension of the multivariate normal distribution. It has parameter, α, which is defined over the range 0 < α ≤ 2, and where the case α = 2 is equivalent to the multivariate normal distribution. It has an additional skew parameter that allows for non-symmetric distributions, where the multivariate normal distribution is symmetric.

01Definition

Let $\mathbb {S}$ be the Euclidean unit sphere in $\mathbb {R} ^{d}$ , that is, $\mathbb {S} =\{u\in \mathbb {R} ^{d}\colon |u|=1\}$ . A random vector $X$ has a multivariate stable distribution, denoted as $X\sim S(\alpha ,\Lambda ,\delta )$ , , if the joint characteristic function of $X$ is

$\operatorname {E} \exp(iu^{T}X)=\exp \left\{-\int \limits _{\mathbb {S} }\left\{|u^{T}s|^{\alpha }+i\nu (u^{T}s,\alpha )\right\}\,\Lambda (ds)+iu^{T}\delta \right\}$ ,

where 0 < α < 2, and for $y\in \mathbb {R}$

$\nu (y,\alpha )={\begin{cases}-\operatorname {sign} (y)\tan(\pi \alpha /2)|y|^{\alpha }&\alpha \neq 1,\\(2/\pi )y\ln |y|&\alpha =1.\end{cases}}$

This is essentially the result of Feldheim, that any stable random vector can be characterized by a spectral measure $\Lambda$ (a finite measure on $\mathbb {S}$ ) and a shift vector $\delta \in \mathbb {R} ^{d}$ .

02Parametrization using projections

Another way to describe a stable random vector is in terms of projections. For any vector $u$ the projection $u^{T}X$ is univariate $\alpha$ -stable with some skewness $\beta (u)$ , scale $\gamma (u)$ , and some shift $\delta (u)$ . The notation $X\sim S(\alpha ,\beta ,\gamma ,\delta )$ is used if X is stable with $u^{T}X\sim s(\alpha ,\beta (u),\gamma (u),\delta (u))$ for every $u\in \mathbb {R} ^{d}$ . This is called the projection parametrization.

The spectral measure determines the projection parameter functions by:

$\gamma (u)={\Bigl (}\int _{\mathbb {S} }|u^{T}s|^{\alpha }\,\Lambda (ds){\Bigr )}^{1/\alpha }$

$\beta (u)=\gamma (u)^{-\alpha }\int _{\mathbb {S} }|u^{T}s|^{\alpha }\operatorname {sign} (u^{T}s)\,\Lambda (ds)$

$\delta (u)={\begin{cases}u^{T}\delta &\alpha \neq 1\\u^{T}\delta -\int _{\mathbb {S} }{\frac {\pi }{2}}u^{T}s\ln |u^{T}s|\,\Lambda (ds)&\alpha =1\end{cases}}$

03Special cases

There are special cases where the multivariate characteristic function takes a simpler form. Define the characteristic function of a stable marginal as

$\omega (y|\alpha ,\beta )={\begin{cases}|y|^{\alpha }\left[1-i\beta (\tan {\frac {\pi \alpha }{2}})\operatorname {sign} (y)\right]&\alpha \neq 1\\|y|\left[1+i\beta {\tfrac {2}{\pi }}\operatorname {sign} (y)\ln |y|\right]&\alpha =1\end{cases}}$

Isotropic multivariate stable distribution

Here the characteristic function is $E\exp(iu^{T}X)=\exp\{-\gamma _{0}^{\alpha }|u|^{\alpha }+iu^{T}\delta )\}$ . The spectral measure is a scalar multiple of the uniform distribution on the sphere, leading to radial/isotropic symmetry. For the Gaussian case $\alpha =2$ this corresponds to independent components, but this is not the case when $\alpha <2$ . Isotropy is a special case of ellipticity (see the next paragraph), just take $\Sigma$ to be a multiple of the identity matrix.

Elliptically contoured multivariate stable distribution

The elliptically contoured multivariate stable distribution is a special symmetric case of the multivariate stable distribution. X is α-stable and elliptically contoured iff it has joint characteristic function $E\exp(iu^{T}X)=\exp\{-(u^{T}\Sigma u)^{\alpha /2}+iu^{T}\delta )\}$ for some shift vector $\delta \in \mathbb {R} ^{d}$ (equal to the mean when it exists) and some positive semidefinite matrix $\Sigma$ (akin to a correlation matrix, although the usual definition of correlation fails to be meaningful). Note the relation to the characteristic function of the multivariate normal distribution: $E\exp(iu^{T}X)=\exp\{-(u^{T}\Sigma u)+iu^{T}\delta )\}$ , obtained when α = 2.

Independent components

The marginals are independent with $X_{j}\sim S(\alpha ,\beta _{j},\gamma _{j},\delta _{j})$ iff the characteristic function is

$E\exp(iu^{T}X)=\exp \left\{-\sum _{j=1}^{m}\omega (u_{j}|\alpha ,\beta _{j})\gamma _{j}^{\alpha }+iu^{T}\delta \right\}$ .

Observe that when α = 2 this reduces again to the multivariate normal; note that the i.i.d. case and the isotropic case do not coincide when α < 2. Independent components is a special case of a discrete spectral measure (see next paragraph), with the spectral measure supported by the standard unit vectors.

Discrete

If the spectral measure is discrete with mass $\lambda _{j}$ at $s_{j}\in \mathbb {S}$ , $j=1,\ldots ,m$ , the characteristic function is

$E\exp(iu^{T}X)=\exp \left\{-\sum _{j=1}^{m}\omega (u^{T}s_{j}|\alpha ,1)\lambda _{j}^{\alpha }+iu^{T}\delta \right\}$ .

04Linear properties

If $X\sim S(\alpha ,\beta (\cdot ),\gamma (\cdot ),\delta (\cdot ))$ is d-dimensional $\alpha$ -stable, A is an m × d matrix, and $b\in \mathbb {R} ^{m},$ then AX + b is m-dimensional $\alpha$ -stable with scale function $\gamma \circ A^{T}$ , skewness function $\beta \circ A^{T}$ , and location function $\delta \circ A^{T}+b^{T}$ .

05Inference in the independent-component model

Bickson and Guestrin have shown how to compute inference in closed form in a linear model (or equivalently a factor analysis model), involving independent-component models.

More specifically, let $X_{i}\sim S(\alpha ,\beta _{x_{i}},\gamma _{x_{i}},\delta _{x_{i}})$ $(i=1,\ldots ,n)$ be a family of i.i.d. unobserved univariates drawn from a stable distribution. Given a known linear relation matrix A of size $n\times n$ , the observations $Y_{i}=\sum _{i=1}^{n}A_{ij}X_{j}$ are assumed to be distributed as a convolution of the hidden factors $X_{i}$ , hence $Y_{i}=S(\alpha ,\beta _{y_{i}},\gamma _{y_{i}},\delta _{y_{i}})$ . The inference task is to compute the most likely $X_{i}$ , given the linear relation matrix A and the observations $Y_{i}$ . This task can be computed in closed form in O(n³).

An application for this construction is multiuser detection with stable, non-Gaussian noise.

06Resources

Mark Veillette's stable distribution matlab package http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/37514
The plots in this page where plotted using Danny Bickson's inference in linear-stable model Matlab package: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bickson/stable

Watch videos about Multivariate stable distributionExplainers and documentaries on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Multivariate stable distribution”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

Images, from Wikimedia Commons:

Mv stable.png by Dannybix, Public domain
Mv indp.png by Dannybix, Public domain
Mv indp2.png by Dannybix, Public domain

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