Estimations of Means and Variances in a Markov Linear Model

Abstract Multivariate regression models and ANOVA are probably the most frequently applied methods of all statistical analyses. We study the case where the predictors are qualitative variables and the response variable is quantitative. In this case, we propose an alternative to the classic approaches that does not assume homoscedasticity but assumes that a Markov chain can describe the covariates’ correlations. This approach transforms the dependent covariates using a change of measure to independent covariates. The transformed estimates allow a pairwise comparison of the mean and variance of the contribution of different values of the covariates. We show that, under standard moment conditions, the estimators are asymptotically normally distributed. We test our method with data from simulations and apply it to several classic data sets.