It is shown that a necessary and sufficient condition for an Archimedean copula generator to generate a $d$-dimensional copula is that the generator is a $d$-monotone function. The class of $d$-dimensional Archimedean copulas is shown to coincide with the class of survival copulas of $d$-dimensional $\ell_1$-norm symmetric distributions that place no point mass at the origin. The $d$-monotone Archimedean copula generators may be characterized using a little-known integral transform of Williamson [Duke Math. J. 23 (1956) 189--207] in an analogous manner to the well-known Bernstein--Widder characterization of completely monotone generators in terms of the Laplace transform. These insights allow the construction of new Archimedean copula families and provide a general solution to the problem of sampling multivariate Archimedean copulas. They also yield useful expressions for the $d$-dimensional Kendall function and Kendall's rank correlation coefficients and facilitate the derivation of results on the existence of densities and the description of singular components for Archimedean copulas. The existence of a sharp lower bound for Archimedean copulas with respect to the positive lower orthant dependence ordering is shown.
The present contribution derives an explicit expression for (a version of) every uni- and multi-variate conditional distribution (i.e., Markov kernel) of Archimedean copulas and uses this representation to generalize a recently established result, saying that in the class of multivariate Archimedean copulas standard uniform convergence implies weak convergence of almost all univariate Markov kernels, to arbitrary multivariate Markov kernels. Moreover, we prove that an Archimedean copula is singular if, and only if, almost all uni- and multivariate Markov kernels are singular. These results are…
We propose a new test for the hypothesis that a bivariate copula is an Archimedean copula. The test statistic is based on a combination of two measures resulting from the characterization of Archimedean copulas by the property of associativity and by a strict upper bound on the diagonal by the Fréchet-upper bound. We prove weak convergence of this statistic and show that the critical values of the corresponding test can be determined by the multiplier bootstrap method. The test is shown to be consistent against all departures from Archimedeanity if the copula satisfies weak smoothness assumpti…
Looking at bivariate copulas from the perspective of conditional distributions and considering weak convergence of almost all conditional distributions yields the notion of weak conditional convergence. At first glance, this notion of convergence for copulas might seem far too restrictive to be of any practical importance - in fact, given samples of a copula $C$ the corresponding empirical copulas do not converge weakly conditional to $C$ with probability one in general. Within the class of Archimedean copulas and the class of Extreme Value copulas, however, standard pointwise convergence and …
Explicit functional forms for the generator derivatives of well-known one-parameter Archimedean copulas are derived. These derivatives are essential for likelihood inference as they appear in the copula density, conditional distribution functions, or the Kendall distribution function. They are also required for several asymmetric extensions of Archimedean copulas such as Khoudraji-transformed Archimedean copulas. Access to the generator derivatives makes maximum-likelihood estimation for Archimedean copulas feasible in terms of both precision and run time, even in large dimensions. It is shown…
An Archimedean copula is characterised by its generator. This is a real function whose inverse behaves as a survival function. We propose a semiparametric generator based on a quadratic spline. This is achieved by modelling the first derivative of a hazard rate function, in a survival analysis context, as a piecewise constant function. Convexity of our semiparametric generator is obtained by imposing some simple constraints. The induced semiparametric Archimedean copula produces Kendall's tau association measure that covers the whole range $(-1,1)$. Inference on the model is done under a Bayes…
We are considered with the false discovery rate (FDR) of the linear step-up test $φ^{LSU}$ considered by Benjamini and Hochberg (1995). It is well known that $φ^{LSU}$ controls the FDR at level $m_0 q / m$ if the joint distribution of $p$-values is multivariate totally positive of order 2. In this, $m$ denotes the total number of hypotheses, $m_0$ the number of true null hypotheses, and $q$ the nominal FDR level. Under the assumption of an Archimedean $p$-value copula with completely monotone generator, we derive a sharper upper bound for the FDR of $φ^{LSU}$ as well as a non-trivial lower bou…
In this paper, we compare the lifetimes of two series and two parallel systems stochastically where the lifetime of each component follows location-scale (LS) family of distributions. The comparison is carried out under two scenarios: one, that the components of the systems have a dependent structure sharing Archimedean copula and two, that the components are independently distributed. It is shown that the systems with components in series or parallel sharing Archimedean copula with more dispersion in the location or scale parameters results in better performance in the sense of the usual stoc…
Nested Archimedean copulas recently gained interest since they generalize the well-known class of Archimedean copulas to allow for partial asymmetry. Sampling algorithms and strategies have been well investigated for nested Archimedean copulas. However, for likelihood based inference it is important to have the density. The present work fills this gap. A general formula for the derivatives of the nodes and inner generators appearing in nested Archimedean copulas is developed. This leads to a tractable formula for the density of nested Archimedean copulas in arbitrary dimensions if the number o…
The copulas of random vectors with standard uniform univariate margins truncated from the right are considered and a general formula for such right-truncated conditional copulas is derived. This formula is analytical for copulas that can be inverted analytically as functions of each single argument. This is the case, for example, for Archimedean and related copulas. The resulting right-truncated Archimedean copulas are not only analytically tractable but can also be characterized as tilted Archimedean copulas. This finding allows one, for example, to more easily derive analytical properties su…
There is a one-to-one correspondence between Lévy copulas and proper copulas. The correspondence relies on a relationship between Lévy copulas sitting on $[0,+\infty]^d$ and max-id distributions. The max-id distributions are defined with respect to a partial order that is compatible with the inclusion of sets bounded away from the origin. An important consequence of the result is the possibility to define parametric Lévy copulas as mirror images of proper parametric copulas. For example, proper Archimedean copulas are generated by functions that are Williamson $d-$transforms of the cdf of the …
Motivated by a recently established result saying that within the class of bivariate Archimedean copulas standard pointwise convergence implies weak convergence of almost all conditional distributions this contribution studies the class $\mathcal{C}_{ar}^d$ of all $d$-dimensional Archimedean copulas with $d \geq 3$ and proves the afore-mentioned implication with respect to conditioning on the first $d-1$ coordinates. Several proper\-ties equivalent to pointwise convergence in $\mathcal{C}_{ar}^d$ are established and - as by-product of working with conditional distributions (Markov kernels) - a…
The underlying dependence structure between two random variables can be described in manifold ways. This includes the examination of certain dependence properties such as lower tail decreasingness (LTD), stochastic increasingness (SI) or total positivity of order 2, the latter usually considered for a copula (TP2) or (if existent) its density (d-TP2). In the present paper we investigate total positivity of order 2 for a copula's Markov kernel (MK-TP2 for short), a positive dependence property that is stronger than TP2 and SI, weaker than d-TP2 but, unlike d-TP2, is not restricted to absolutely…
Given two random variables $X$ and $Y$, stochastic monotonicity describes a monotone influence of $X$ on $Y$. We prove two different characterizations of stochastically monotone $2$-copulas using the isomorphism between $2$-copulas and Markov operators. The first approach establishes a one-to-one correspondence between stochastically monotone copulas and monotonicity-preserving Markov operators. The second approach characterizes stochastically monotone copulas by their monotonicity property with respect to the Markov product. Applying the latter result, we identify all idempotent stochasticall…
This paper introduces a new class of Cox models for dependent bivariate data. The impact of the covariate on the dependence of the variables is captured through the modification of their copula. Various classes of well known copulas are stable under the model (archimedean type and extreme value copulas), meaning that the role of the covariate acts in a simple and explicit way on the copula in the class; specific parametric classes are considered.
Over the last couple of decades, several copula based methods have been proposed in the literature to test for the independence among several random variables. But these existing tests are not invariant under monotone transformations of the variables, and they often perform poorly if the dependence among the variables is highly non-monotone in nature. In this article, we propose a copula based measure of dependency and use it to construct some new distribution-free tests of independence. The proposed measure and the resulting tests, all are invariant under permutations and monotone transformat…
Copulas have been popular to model dependence for multivariate distributions, but have not been used much in modelling temporal dependence of univariate time series. This paper demonstrates some difficulties with using copulas even for Markov processes: some tractable copulas such as mixtures between copulas of complete co- and countermonotonicity and independence (Fréchet copulas) are shown to imply quite a restricted type of Markov process and Archimedean copulas are shown to be incompatible with Markov chains. We also investigate Markov chains that are spreadable or, equivalently, condition…
Liouville copulas, which were introduced in McNeil and Neslehova (2010), are asymmetric generalizations of the ubiquitous Archimedean copula class. They are the dependence structures of scale mixtures of Dirichlet distributions, also called Liouville distributions. In this paper, the limiting extreme-value copulas of Liouville copulas and of their survival counterparts are derived. The limiting max-stable models, termed here the scaled extremal Dirichlet, are new and encompass several existing classes of multivariate max-stable distributions, including the logistic, negative logistic and extre…
This paper deals with dependence across marginally exponentially distributed arrival times, such as default times in financial modeling or inter-failure times in reliability theory. We explore the relationship between dependence and the possibility to sample final multivariate survival in a long time-interval as a sequence of iterations of local multivariate survivals along a partition of the total time interval. We find that this is possible under a form of multivariate lack of memory that is linked to a property of the survival times copula. This property defines a "self-chaining-copula", an…
We propose notions of calibration for probabilistic forecasts of general multivariate quantities. Probabilistic copula calibration is a natural analogue of probabilistic calibration in the univariate setting. It can be assessed empirically by checking for the uniformity of the copula probability integral transform (CopPIT), which is invariant under coordinate permutations and coordinatewise strictly monotone transformations of the predictive distribution and the outcome. The CopPIT histogram can be interpreted as a generalization and variant of the multivariate rank histogram, which has been u…
Continuation refers to the operation by which the cumulative distribution function of a discontinuous random vector is made continuous through multilinear interpolation. The copula that results from the application of this technique to the classical empirical copula is either called the multilinear or the checkerboard copula. As shown by Genest and Nešlehová (Astin Bull. 37 (2007) 475-515) and Nešlehová (J. Multivariate Anal. 98 (2007) 544-567), this copula plays a central role in characterizing dependence concepts in discrete random vectors. In this paper, the authors establish the asymptotic…
As a motivating problem, we aim to study some special aspects of the marginal distributions of the order statistics for exchangeable and (more generally) for minimally stable non-negative random variables $T_{1},...,T_{r}$. In any case, we assume that $T_{1},...,T_{r}$ are identically distributed, with a common survival function $\overline{G}$ and their survival copula is denoted by $K$. The diagonal's and subdiagonals' sections of $K$, along with $\overline{G}$, are possible tools to describe the information needed to recover the laws of order statistics. When attention is restricted to the a…
