Constructions for a bivariate beta distribution

Abstract

The beta distribution is a basic distribution serving several purposes. It is used to model data, and also, as a more flexible version of the uniform distribution, it serves as a prior distribution for a binomial probability. The bivariate beta distribution plays a similar role for two probabilities that have a bivariate binomial distribution. We provide a new multivariate distribution with beta marginal distributions, positive probability over the unit square, and correlations over the full range. We discuss its extension to three or more dimensions.