Distribution theory of quadratic forms with matrix argument

Abstract

This paper proposes the density and characteristic functions of a general matrix quadratic form $\mathbf{X}^{*}\mathbf{AX}$, when $\mathbf{A} = \mathbf{A}^{*}$, $\mathbf{X}$ has a matrix multivariate elliptical distribution and $\mathbf{X}^{*}$ denotes the usual conjugate transpose of $\mathbf{X}$. These results are obtained for real normed division algebras. With particular cases we obtained the density and characteristic functions of matrix quadratic forms for matrix multivariate normal, Pearson type VII, $t$ and Cauchy distributions.