Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Statistical models for extreme values are generally derived from non-degenerate probabilistic limits that can be used to approximate the distribution of events that exceed a selected high threshold. If convergence to the limit distribution is slow, then the approximation may describe observed extremes poorly, and bias can only be reduced by choosing a very high threshold at the cost of unacceptably large variance in any subsequent tail inference. An alternative is to use sub-asymptotic extremal models, which introduce more parameters but can provide better fits for lower thresholds. We consider this problem in the context of the Heffernan–Tawn conditional tail model for multivariate extremes, which has found wide use due to its flexible handling of dependence in high-dimensional applications. Recent extensions of this model appear to improve joint tail inference. We seek a sub-asymptotic justification for why these extensions work and show that they can improve convergence rates by an order of magnitude for certain copulas. We also propose a class of extensions of them that may have wider value for statistical inference in multivariate extremes.
Loading
Loading
Loading
Loading
Loading
large' observations under the assumption that they follow the spectral distribution. There has been little attention on studying the impact of this approximation on inference, and it turns out that it can yield significantly biased estimates. We provide a characterization of the angular distribution of excesses corresponding to the distribution of pseudo-angles of
large'observations that improves direct inference on the spectral distribution in the bivariate setting.
Extremal dependence is at the heart of extreme value modelling and numerous measures to quantify it have been proposed in the literature. In many applications, datasets seem to exhibit asymmetry in the dependence between the variables. Many parametric multivariate extreme-value models can accommodate asymmetry in the sense that the spectral density can be asymmetric, resulting in a non-exchangeable dependence structure. There has been little attention paid to quantifying asymmetry at extreme levels, which can be useful for diagnosis and model checking. We propose a coefficient of extremal asymmetry that quantifies the asymmetry at extreme levels for pairs of variables. We also propose two non-parametric estimators of the coefficient of extremal asymmetry and compare their properties through numerical simulation. The two estimators have diametrically opposed bias-variance trade-offs. The estimator based on maximum empirical likelihood performs well and is nearly unbiased.