5. Conclusions
We have presented a family of distributions to model asymmetric data with positive and negative values. It allows investigators to model microarray data, preserving their original scale. Although the construction of this family of distributions was motivated by microarray data, it is important to notice that the model is also useful in other environments, such as chemical and magnetical contamination data. A method has been given to estimate quantiles and in our examples, specific quantile–quantile plots were effective tools for a visual evaluation of the data fit to the estimated models.