The distribution of the product of powers of independent uniform random variables - A simple but useful tool to address and better understand the structure of some distributions

What is the distribution of the product of given powers of independent uniform (0, 1) random variables? Is this distribution useful? Is this distribution commonly used in some contexts? Is this distribution somehow related to the distribution of the product of other random variables? Are there some test statistics with this distribution? This paper will give the answers to the above questions. It will be seen that the answer to the last four questions above is: yes! We will show how particular choices of the numbers of variables involved and their powers will result in interesting and useful distributions and how these distributions may help us to shed some new light on some well-known distributions and also how it may help us to address, in a much simpler way, some distributions usually considered to be rather complicated as is the case with the exact distribution of a number of statistics used in Multivariate Analysis, including some whose exact distribution up until now is not available in a concise and manageable form. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.