Ioannis Papastathopoulos

Estimation of the conditional distribution of a multivariate variable given that one of its components is large: Additional constraints for the Heffernan and Tawn model

A number of different approaches to study multivariate extremes have been developed. Arguably the most useful and flexible is the theory for the distribution of a vector variable given that one of its components is large. We build on the conditional approach of Heffernan and Tawn (2004) [13] for estimating this type of multivariate extreme property. Specifically we propose additional constraints for, and slight changes in, their model formulation. These changes in the method are aimed at overcoming complications that have been experienced with using the approach in terms of their modelling of negatively associated variables, parameter identifiability problems and drawing conditional inferences which are inconsistent with the marginal distributions. The benefits of the methods are illustrated using river flow data from two tributaries of the River Thames in the UK.

Extended generalised Pareto models for tail estimation

The most popular approach in extreme value statistics is the modelling of threshold exceedances using the asymptotically motivated generalised Pareto distribution. This approach involves the selection of a high threshold above which the model fits the data well. Sometimes, few observations of a measurement process might be recorded in applications and so selecting a high quantile of the sample as the threshold leads to almost no exceedances. In this paper we propose extensions of the generalised Pareto distribution that incorporate an additional shape parameter while keeping the tail behaviour unaffected. The inclusion of this parameter offers additional structure for the main body of the distribution, improves the stability of the modified scale, tail index and return level estimates to threshold choice and allows a lower threshold to be selected. We illustrate the benefits of the proposed models with a simulation study and two case studies.

Extreme Events of Markov Chains

Abstract The extremal behaviour of a Markov chain is typically characterised by its tail chain. For asymptotically dependent Markov chains, existing formulations fail to capture the full evolution of the extreme event when the chain moves out of the extreme tail region, and, for asymptotically independent chains, recent results fail to cover well-known asymptotically independent processes, such as Markov processes with a Gaussian copula between consecutive values. We use more sophisticated limiting mechanisms that cover a broader class of asymptotically independent processes than current methods, including an extension of the canonical Heffernan‒Tawn normalisation scheme, and reveal features which existing methods reduce to a degenerate form associated with nonextreme states.

Conditioned limit laws for inverted max-stable processes

Max-stable processes are widely used to model spatial extremes. These processes exhibit asymptotic dependence meaning that the large values of the process can occur simultaneously over space. Recently, inverted max-stable processes have been proposed as an important new class for spatial extremes which are in the domain of attraction of a spatially independent max-stable process but instead they cover the broad class of asymptotic independence. To study the extreme values of such processes we use the conditioned approach to multivariate extremes that characterises the limiting distribution of appropriately normalised random vectors given that at least one of their components is large. The current statistical methods for the conditioned approach are based on a canonical parametric family of location and scale norming functions. We study broad classes of inverted max-stable processes containing processes linked to the widely studied max-stable models of Brown-Resnick and extremal- t ,źand identify conditions for the normalisations to either belong to the canonical family or not. Despite such differences at an asymptotic level, we show that at practical levels, the canonical model can approximate well the true conditional distributions.

Dependence properties of multivariate max-stable distributions

For an m-dimensional multivariate extreme value distribution there exist 2^m-1 exponent measures which are linked and completely characterise the dependence of the distribution and all of its lower dimensional margins. In this paper we generalise the inequalities of Schlather and Tawn (2002) for the sets of extremal coefficients and construct bounds that higher order exponent measures need to satisfy to be consistent with lower order exponent measures. Subsequently we construct nonparametric estimators of the exponent measures which impose, through a likelihood-based procedure, the new dependence constraints and provide an improvement on the unconstrained estimators.