On Riesz and Wishart distributions associated with decomposable undirected graphs

Classical Wishart distributions on the open convex cone of positive definite matrices and their fundamental features are extended to generalized Riesz and Wishart distributions associated with decomposable undirected graphs using the basic theory of exponential families. The families of these distributions are parameterized by their expectations/natural parameter and multivariate shape parameter and have a non-trivial overlap with the generalized Wishart distributions defined in Andersson and Wojnar (2004) [4,8]. This work also extends the Wishart distributions of type I in Letac and Massam (2007) [7] and, more importantly, presents an alternative point of view on the latter paper. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.