"This book reviews the state-of-the-art advances in skew-elliptical distributions and provides many new developments in a single volume, collecting theoretical results and applications previously scattered throughout the literature. The main goal of this research area is to develop flexible parametric classes of distributions beyond the classical normal distribution. The book is divided into two parts. The first part discusses theory and inference for skew-elliptical distributions. The second part presents applications and case studies, in areas such as economics, finance, oceanography, climatology, environmetrics, engineering, image precessing, astronomy, and biomedical science."--BOOK JACKET.