The Dirichlet distribution appears in many areas of application, which include modelling of compositional data, Bayesian analysis, statistical genetics, and nonparametric inference. This book provides a comprehensive review of the Dirichlet distribution and two extended versions, the Grouped Dirichlet Distribution (GDD) and the Nested Dirichlet Distribution (NDD), arising from likelihood and Bayesian analysis of incomplete categorical data and survey data with non-response.

The theoretical properties and applications are also reviewed in detail for other related distributions, such as the inverted Dirichlet distribution, Dirichlet-multinomial distribution, the truncated Dirichlet distribution, the generalized Dirichlet distribution, Hyper-Dirichlet distribution, scaled Dirichlet distribution, mixed Dirichlet distribution, Liouville distribution, and the generalized Liouville distribution.