We introduce a new goodness-of-fit test for regular vine (R-vine) copula models. R-vine copulas are a very flexible class of multivariate copulas based on a pair-copula construction (PCC). The test arises from the information matrix equality and specification test proposed by White (1982) and extends the goodness-of-fit test for copulas introduced by Huang and Prokhorov (2011). The corresponding critical value can be approximated by asymptotic theory or simulation. The simulation based test shows excellent performance with regard to observed size and power in an extensive simulation study, while the asymptotic theory based test is inaccurate for n<10000 for a 5-dimensional model (in d=8 even 20000 are not enough). The simulation based test is applied to select among different R-vine specifications to model the dependency among exchange rates.
We introduce a new goodness-of-fit test for regular vine (R-vine) copula models, a flexible class of multivariate copulas based on a pair-copula construction (PCC). The test arises from the information matrix ratio. The corresponding test statistic is derived and its asymptotic normality is proven. The test's power is investigated and compared to 14 other goodness-of-fit tests, adapted from the bivariate copula case, in a high dimensional setting. The extensive simulation study shows the excellent performance with respect to size and power as well as the superiority of the information matrix r…
Two goodness-of-fit tests for copulas are being investigated. The first one deals with the case of elliptical copulas and the second one deals with independent copulas. These tests result from the expansion of the projection pursuit methodology we will introduce in the present article. This method enables us to determine on which axis system these copulas lie as well as the exact value of these very copulas in the basis formed by the axes previously determined irrespective of their value in their canonical basis. Simulations are also presented as well as an application to real datasets.
In the last decade, simplified vine copula models have been an active area of research. They build a high dimensional probability density from the product of marginals densities and bivariate copula densities. Besides parametric models, several approaches to nonparametric estimation of vine copulas have been proposed. In this article, we extend these approaches and compare them in an extensive simulation study and a real data application. We identify several factors driving the relative performance of the estimators. The most important one is the strength of dependence. No method was found to …
Quantile regression, that is the prediction of conditional quantiles, has steadily gained importance in statistical modeling and financial applications. The authors introduce a new semiparametric quantile regression method based on sequentially fitting a likelihood optimal D-vine copula to given data resulting in highly flexible models with easily extractable conditional quantiles. As a subclass of regular vine copulas, D-vines enable the modeling of multivariate copulas in terms of bivariate building blocks, a so-called pair-copula construction (PCC). The proposed algorithm works fast and acc…
A pair-copula construction is a decomposition of a multivariate copula into a structured system, called regular vine, of bivariate copulae or pair-copulae. The standard practice is to model these pair-copulae parametrically, which comes at the cost of a large model risk, with errors propagating throughout the vine structure. The empirical pair-copula proposed in the paper provides a nonparametric alternative still achieving the parametric convergence rate. It can be used as a basis for inference on dependence measures, for selecting and pruning the vine structure, and for hypothesis tests conc…
We examine the dependence structure of finite block-maxima of multivariate distributions. We provide a closed form expression for the copula density of the vector of the block-maxima. Further, we show how partial derivatives of three-dimensional vine copulas can be obtained by only one-dimensional integration. Combining these results allows the numerical treatment of the block-maxima of any three-dimensional vine copula for finite block-sizes. We look at certain vine copula specifications and examine how the density of the block-maxima behaves for different block-sizes. Additionally, a real da…
In the multiple testing context, we utilize vine copulae for optimizing the effective number of tests. It is well known that for the calibration of multiple tests (for control of the family-wise error rate) the dependencies between the marginal tests are of utmost importance. It has been shown in previous work, that positive dependencies between the marginal tests can be exploited in order to derive a relaxed Sidak-type multiplicity correction. This correction can conveniently be expressed by calculating the corresponding "effective number of tests" for a given (global) significance level. Thi…
Practical applications of nonparametric density estimators in more than three dimensions suffer a great deal from the well-known curse of dimensionality: convergence slows down as dimension increases. We show that one can evade the curse of dimensionality by assuming a simplified vine copula model for the dependence between variables. We formulate a general nonparametric estimator for such a model and show under high-level assumptions that the speed of convergence is independent of dimension. We further discuss a particular implementation for which we validate the high-level assumptions and es…
We consider the problem of testing hypotheses on the copula density from $n$ bi-dimensional observations. We wish to test the null hypothesis characterized by a parametric class against a composite nonparametric alternative. Each density under the alternative is separated in the $L_2$-norm from any density lying in the null hypothesis. The copula densities under consideration are supposed to belong to a range of Besov balls. According to the minimax approach, the testing problem is solved in an adaptive framework: it leads to a $\log\log$ term loss in the minimax rate of testing in comparison …
Testing the simplifying assumption in high-dimensional vine copulas is a difficult task. Tests must be based on estimated observations and check constraints on high-dimensional distributions. So far, corresponding tests have been limited to single conditional copulas with a low-dimensional set of conditioning variables. We propose a novel testing procedure that is computationally feasible for high-dimensional data sets and that exhibits a power that decreases only slightly with the dimension. By discretizing the support of the conditioning variables and incorporating a penalty in the test stat…
Measuring interdependence between probabilities of default (PDs) in different industry sectors of an economy plays a crucial role in financial stress testing. Thereby, regression approaches may be employed to model the impact of stressed industry sectors as covariates on other response sectors. We identify vine copula based quantile regression as an eligible tool for conducting such stress tests as this method has good robustness properties, takes into account potential nonlinearities of conditional quantile functions and ensures that no quantile crossing effects occur. We illustrate its perfo…
Let $(X_1,Y_1),\ldots,(X_n,Y_n)$ be an i.i.d. sample from a bivariate distribution function that lies in the max-domain of attraction of an extreme value distribution. The asymptotic joint distribution of the standardized component-wise maxima $\bigvee_{i=1}^nX_i$ and $\bigvee_{i=1}^nY_i$ is then characterized by the marginal extreme value indices and the tail copula $R$. We propose a procedure for constructing asymptotically distribution-free goodness-of-fit tests for the tail copula $R$. The procedure is based on a transformation of a suitable empirical process derived from a semi-parametric…
We reconsider the existing kernel estimators for a copula function, as proposed in Gijbels and Mielniczuk [Comm. Statist. Theory Methods 19 (1990) 445--464], Fermanian, Radulovič and Wegkamp [Bernoulli 10 (2004) 847--860] and Chen and Huang [Canad. J. Statist. 35 (2007) 265--282]. All of these estimators have as a drawback that they can suffer from a corner bias problem. A way to deal with this is to impose rather stringent conditions on the copula, outruling as such many classical families of copulas. In this paper, we propose improved estimators that take care of the typical corner bias prob…
Understanding multivariate extreme events play a crucial role in managing the risks of complex systems since extremes are governed by their own mechanisms. Conditional on a given variable exceeding a high threshold (e.g.\ traffic intensity), knowing which high-impact quantities (e.g\ air pollutant levels) are the most likely to be extreme in the future is key. This article investigates the contribution of marginal extreme events on future extreme events of related quantities. We propose an Extreme Event Propagation framework to maximise counterfactual causation probabilities between a known ca…
Today weather forecasting is conducted using numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, consisting of a set of differential equations describing the dynamics of the atmosphere. The output of such NWP models are single deterministic forecasts of future atmospheric states. To assess uncertainty in NWP forecasts so-called forecast ensembles are utilized. They are generated by employing a NWP model for distinct variants. However, as forecast ensembles are not able to capture the full amount of uncertainty in an NWP model, they often exhibit biases and dispersion errors. Therefore it has become com…
We review the main "omnibus procedures" for goodness-of-fit testing for copulas: tests based on the empirical copula process, on probability integral transformations, on Kendall's dependence function, etc, and some corresponding reductions of dimension techniques. The problems of finding asymptotic distribution-free test statistics and the calculation of reliable p-values are discussed. Some particular cases, like convenient tests for time-dependent copulas, for Archimedean or extreme-value copulas, etc, are dealt with. Finally, the practical performances of the proposed approaches are briefly…
In materials science and many other application domains, 3D information can often only be extrapolated by taking 2D slices. In topological data analysis, persistence vineyards have emerged as a powerful tool to take into account topological features stretching over several slices. In the present paper, we illustrate how persistence vineyards can be used to design rigorous statistical hypothesis tests for 3D microstructure models based on data from 2D slices. More precisely, by establishing the asymptotic normality of suitable longitudinal and cross-sectional summary statistics, we devise goodn…
It is often reasonable to assume that the dependence structure of a bivariate continuous distribution belongs to the class of extreme-value copulas. The latter are characterized by their Pickands dependence function. In this paper, a procedure is proposed for testing whether this function belongs to a given parametric family. The test is based on a Cramér--von Mises statistic measuring the distance between an estimate of the parametric Pickands dependence function and either one of two nonparametric estimators thereof studied by Genest and Segers [Ann. Statist. 37 (2009) 2990--3022]. As the li…
We propose a new goodness-of-fit test for copulas, based on empirical copula processes and their nonparametric bootstrap counterparts. The standard Kolmogorov-Smirnov type test for copulas that takes the supremum of the empirical copula process indexed by half spaces is extended by test statistics based on the supremum of the empirical copula process indexed by partitions of Ln rectangles with Ln slowly tending to infinity. Although the underlying empirical process does not converge, it is proved that the p-values of our new test statistic can be consistently estimated by the bootstrap. Simula…
We revisit the Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Cramér-von Mises goodness-of-fit (GoF) tests and propose a generalisation to identically distributed, but dependent univariate random variables. We show that the dependence leads to a reduction of the "effective" number of independent observations. The generalised GoF tests are not distribution-free but rather depend on all the lagged bivariate copulas. These objects, that we call "self-copulas", encode all the non-linear temporal dependences. We introduce a specific, log-normal model for these self-copulas, for which a number of analytical results are der…
Quantile regression is a field with steadily growing importance in statistical modeling. It is a complementary method to linear regression, since computing a range of conditional quantile functions provides a more accurate modelling of the stochastic relationship among variables, especially in the tails. We introduce a non-restrictive and highly flexible nonparametric quantile regression approach based on C- and D-vine copulas. Vine copulas allow for separate modeling of marginal distributions and the dependence structure in the data, and can be expressed through a graph theoretical model give…
A multivariate distribution function F is in the max-domain of attraction of an extreme value distribution if and only if this is true for the copula corresponding to F and its univariate margins. Aulbach et al. (2012a) have shown that a copula satisfies the extreme value condition if and only if the copula is tail equivalent to a generalized Pareto copula (GPC). In this paper we propose a chi-square goodness-of-fit test in arbitrary dimension for testing whether a copula is in a certain neighborhood of a GPC. The test can be applied to stochastic processes as well to check whether the corresp…
Bivariate Frank Copula: Some More Results on Point Estimation of the Association Parameter from a Bayesian Perspective and Revisiting the Goodness of Fit Tests with an Application to Model Groundwater Data from Dong Thap, Vietnam
Faculty of Applied Science, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT)（胡志明市理工大学应用科学学院）；Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City（越南国家大学胡志明市分校）；Faculty of Mathematics and Statistics, Ton Duc Thang University（Ton Duc Thang大学数学与统计学院）
Vine copulas allow to build flexible dependence models for an arbitrary number of variables using only bivariate building blocks. The number of parameters in a vine copula model increases quadratically with the dimension, which poses new challenges in high-dimensional applications. To alleviate the computational burden and risk of overfitting, we propose a modified Bayesian information criterion (BIC) tailored to sparse vine copula models. We show that the criterion can consistently distinguish between the true and alternative models under less stringent conditions than the classical BIC. The …
Research on structure determination and parameter estimation of hierarchical Archimedean copulas (HACs) has so far mostly focused on the case in which all appearing Archimedean copulas belong to the same Archimedean family. The present work addresses this issue and proposes a new approach for estimating HACs that involve different Archimedean families. It is based on employing goodness-of-fit test statistics directly into HAC estimation. The approach is summarized in a simple algorithm, its theoretical justification is given and its applicability is illustrated by several experiments, which in…
Systems subject to uncertain inputs produce uncertain responses. Uncertainty quantification (UQ) deals with the estimation of statistics of the system response, given a computational model of the system and a probabilistic model of its inputs. In engineering applications it is common to assume that the inputs are mutually independent or coupled by a Gaussian or elliptical dependence structure (copula). In this paper we overcome such limitations by modelling the dependence structure of multivariate inputs as vine copulas. Vine copulas are models of multivariate dependence built from simpler pai…
We demonstrate how the uncertainty of parameter point estimates can be assessed in a maximum likelihood framework in order to prevent overfitting and erroneous detection of time-inhomogeneity. The class of models we consider are regular vine (R-vine) copula models, for which we describe a new algorithm for the exact computation of the score function and observed information. R-vine copulas constitute a flexible class of dependence models which are constructed hierarchically from bivariate copulas as building blocks only, and our algorithm exploits the hierarchical nature for subsequent computa…
Copula-Stein Discrepancy: A Generator-Based Stein Operator for Archimedean Dependence
Department of Mathematics, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, Louisiana, USA（路易斯安那州拉法叶大学数学系）；Department of Statistics, formerly of Presidency College, Kolkata, India（加德满都大学统计系）
Bi-factor and second-order models based on copulas are proposed for item response data, where the items can be split into non-overlapping groups such that there is a homogeneous dependence within each group. Our general models include the Gaussian bi-factor and second-order models as special cases and can lead to more probability in the joint upper or lower tail compared with the Gaussian bi-factor and second-order models. Details on maximum likelihood estimation of parameters for the bi-factor and second-order copula models are given, as well as model selection and goodness-of-fit techniques.…
The estimation of travel time distribution (TTD) is critical for reliable route guidance and provides theoretical bases and technical support for advanced traffic management and control. The state-of-the art procedure for estimating arterial TTD commonly assumes that the path travel time follows a certain distribution without considering segment correlation. However, this approach is usually unrealistic as travel times on successive segments may be dependent. In this study, copula functions are used to model arterial TTD as copulas are able to incorporate for segment correlation. First, segmen…
Copula modeling has gained much attention in many fields recently with the advantage of separating dependence structure from marginal distributions. In real data, however, serious ties are often present in one or multiple margins, which cause problems to many rank-based statistical methods developed under the assumption of continuous data with no ties. Simple methods such as breaking the ties at random or using average rank introduce independence into the data and, hence, lead to biased estimation. We propose an estimation method that treats the ranks of tied data as being interval censored an…
The increasing penetration of renewable energy along with the variations of the loads bring large uncertainties in the power system states that are threatening the security of power system planning and operation. Facing these challenges, this paper proposes a cost-effective, nonparametric method to quantify the impact of uncertain power injections on the load margins. First, we propose to generate system uncertain inputs via a novel vine copula due to its capability in simulating complex multivariate highly dependent model inputs. Furthermore, to reduce the prohibitive computational time requi…
With the advancements of computer architectures, the use of computational models proliferates to solve complex problems in many scientific applications such as nuclear physics and climate research. However, the potential of such models is often hindered because they tend to be computationally expensive and consequently ill-fitting for uncertainty quantification. Furthermore, they are usually not calibrated with real-time observations. We develop a computationally efficient algorithm based on variational Bayes inference (VBI) for calibration of computer models with Gaussian processes. Unfortuna…
For a particular disease there may be two diagnostic tests developed, where each of the tests is subject to several studies. A quadrivariate generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) has been recently proposed to joint meta-analyse and compare two diagnostic tests. We propose a D-vine copula mixed model for joint meta-analysis and comparison of two diagnostic tests. Our general model includes the quadrivariate GLMM as a special case and can also operate on the original scale of sensitivities and specificities. The method allows the direct calculation of sensitivity and specificity for each test, a…
We propose a new method for estimating the extreme quantiles for a function of several dependent random variables. In contrast to the conventional approach based on extreme value theory, we do not impose the condition that the tail of the underlying distribution admits an approximate parametric form, and, furthermore, our estimation makes use of the full observed data. The proposed method is semiparametric as no parametric forms are assumed on all the marginal distributions. But we select appropriate bivariate copulas to model the joint dependence structure by taking the advantage of the recen…
We consider the problem of modeling the dependence among many time series. We build high dimensional time-varying copula models by combining pair-copula constructions (PCC) with stochastic autoregressive copula (SCAR) models to capture dependence that changes over time. We show how the estimation of this highly complex model can be broken down into the estimation of a sequence of bivariate SCAR models, which can be achieved by using the method of simulated maximum likelihood. Further, by restricting the conditional dependence parameter on higher cascades of the PCC to be constant, we can great…
In this paper, we concentrate on new methodologies for copulas introduced and developed by Joe, Cooke, Bedford, Kurowica, Daneshkhah and others on the new class of graphical models called vines as a way of constructing higher dimensional distributions. We develop the approximation method presented by Bedford et al (2012) at which they show that any $n$-dimensional copula density can be approximated arbitrarily well pointwise using a finite parameter set of 2-dimensional copulas in a vine or pair-copula construction. Our constructive approach involves the use of minimum information copulas that…
Copula Based Fusion of Clinical and Genomic Machine Learning Risk Scores for Breast Cancer Risk Stratification
Department of Mathematics, University of Louisiana at Lafayette（路易斯安那州立大学拉斐特分校数学系）；Department of Physical Sciences & Mathematics, West Liberty University（韦斯特里布利大学物理科学与数学系）；Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Minnesota State University（明尼苏达州立大学数学与统计学系）
