Modeling the dynamics of marriage-migration distance through a generalized power gamma–Weibull distribution

Female marriage migration plays a vital role in shaping the social, economic, and cultural structure of rural communities. Deeply ingrained sociocultural norms involving kinship networks, marriage customs, and local traditions are reflected in the distance women travel after marriage. This study presents a proposed four-parameter novel generalized exponential distribution in order to capture the intricate nature of these migration patterns. The distribution includes important characteristics of the exponential, gamma, and Weibull families and offers significant flexibility for modeling skewness, heavy tails, and heterogeneity. It is especially well suited for representing positively skewed migration-distance data due to its structural flexibility. The suggested model continuously showed strong fit across methods, demonstrating its efficacy for analyzing female marriage-migration behavior. Model parameters were estimated using a variety of techniques, including maximum likelihood, method of moments, least squares, Cramér–von Mises, and Anderson–Darling.