Copulas provide an attractive approach for constructing multivariate distributions with flexible marginal distributions and different forms of dependences. Of particular importance in many areas is the possibility of explicitly forecasting the tail-dependences. Most of the available approaches are only able to estimate tail-dependences and correlations via nuisance parameters, but can neither be used for interpretation, nor for forecasting. Aiming to improve copula forecasting performance, we propose a general Bayesian approach for modeling and forecasting tail-dependences and correlations as explicit functions of covariates. The proposed covariate-dependent copula model also allows for Bayesian variable selection among covariates from the marginal models as well as the copula density. The copulas we study include Joe-Clayton copula, Clayton copula, Gumbel copula and Student's \emph{t}-copula. Posterior inference is carried out using an efficient MCMC simulation method. Our approach is applied to both simulated data and the S\&P 100 and S\&P 600 stock indices. The forecasting performance of the proposed approach is compared with other modeling strategies based on log predictive scores. Value-at-Risk evaluation is also preformed for model comparisons.
We propose a flexible copula model to describe changes with a covariate in the dependence structure of (conditionally exchangeable) random variables. The starting point is a spline approximation to the generator of an Archimedean copula. Changes in the dependence structure with a covariate $x$ are modelled by flexible regression of the spline coefficients on $x$. The performances and properties of the spline estimate of the reference generator and the abilities of these conditional models to approximate conditional copulas are studied through simulations. Inference is made using Bayesian argum…
Conditional copulas are flexible statistical tools that couple joint conditional and marginal conditional distributions. In a linear regression setting with more than one covariate and two dependent outcomes, we propose the use of additive models for conditional bivariate copula models and discuss computation and model selection tools for performing Bayesian inference. The method is illustrated using simulations and a real example.
In this article, we analyze perinatal data with birth weight (BW) as primarily interesting response variable. Gestational age (GA) is usually an important covariate and included in polynomial form. However, in opposition to this univariate regression, bivariate modeling of BW and GA is recommended to distinguish effects on each, on both, and between them. Rather than a parametric bivariate distribution, we apply conditional copula regression, where marginal distributions of BW and GA (not necessarily of the same form) can be estimated independently, and where the dependence structure is modele…
Several studies on heritability in twins aim at understanding the different contribution of environmental and genetic factors to specific traits. Considering the National Merit Twin Study, our purpose is to correctly analyse the influence of the socioeconomic status on the relationship between twins' cognitive abilities. Our methodology is based on conditional copulas, which allow us to model the effect of a covariate driving the strength of dependence between the main variables. We propose a flexible Bayesian nonparametric approach for the estimation of conditional copulas, which can model an…
In recent years, conditional copulas, that allow dependence between variables to vary according to the values of one or more covariates, have attracted increasing attention. In high dimension, vine copulas offer greater flexibility compared to multivariate copulas, since they are constructed using bivariate copulas as building blocks. In this paper we present a novel inferential approach for multivariate distributions, which combines the flexibility of vine constructions with the advantages of Bayesian nonparametrics, not requiring the specification of parametric families for each pair copula.…
Bayesian computation for filtering and forecasting analysis is developed for a broad class of dynamic models. The ability to scale-up such analyses in non-Gaussian, nonlinear multivariate time series models is advanced through the introduction of a novel copula construction in sequential filtering of coupled sets of dynamic generalized linear models. The new copula approach is integrated into recently introduced multiscale models in which univariate time series are coupled via nonlinear forms involving dynamic latent factors representing cross-series relationships. The resulting methodology of…
Parametric conditional copula models allow the copula parameters to vary with a set of covariates according to an unknown calibration function. Flexible Bayesian inference for the calibration function of a bivariate conditional copula is proposed via a sparse Gaussian process (GP) prior distribution over the set of smooth calibration functions for the single index model (SIM). The estimation of parameters from the marginal distributions and the calibration function is done jointly via Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling from the full posterior distribution. A new Conditional Cross Validated Pseu…
We show how to extract the implicit copula of a response vector from a Bayesian regularized regression smoother with Gaussian disturbances. The copula can be used to compare smoothers that employ different shrinkage priors and function bases. We illustrate with three popular choices of shrinkage priors --- a pairwise prior, the horseshoe prior and a g prior augmented with a point mass as employed for Bayesian variable selection --- and both univariate and multivariate function bases. The implicit copulas are high-dimensional, have flexible dependence structures that are far from that of a Gaus…
Copula models are flexible tools to represent complex structures of dependence for multivariate random variables. According to Sklar's theorem (Sklar, 1959), any d-dimensional absolutely continuous density can be uniquely represented as the product of the marginal distributions and a copula function which captures the dependence structure among the vector components. In real data applications, the interest of the analyses often lies on specific functionals of the dependence, which quantify aspects of it in a few numerical values. A broad literature exists on such functionals, however extension…
The estimation of dependencies between multiple variables is a central problem in the analysis of financial time series. A common approach is to express these dependencies in terms of a copula function. Typically the copula function is assumed to be constant but this may be inaccurate when there are covariates that could have a large influence on the dependence structure of the data. To account for this, a Bayesian framework for the estimation of conditional copulas is proposed. In this framework the parameters of a copula are non-linearly related to some arbitrary conditioning variables. We e…
Cardiovascular disease lead the cause of death world wide and several studies have been carried out to understand and explore cardiovascular risk markers in normoglycemic and diabetic populations. In this work, we explore the association structure between hyperglycemic markers and cardiovascular risk markers controlled by triglycerides, body mass index, age and gender, for the normoglycemic population in The Mexico City Diabetes Study. Understanding the association structure could contribute to the assessment of additional cardiovascular risk markers in this low income urban population with a …
We propose a class of dynamic vine copula models. This is an extension of static vine copulas and a generalization of dynamic C-vine and D-vine copulas studied by Almeida et al (2016) and Goel and Mehra (2019). Within this class, we allow for time-varying dependence by driving the vine copula parameters with latent AR(1) processes. This modeling approach is very flexible but estimation is not straightforward due to the high-dimensional parameter space. We propose a Bayesian estimation approach, which relies on a novel approximation of the posterior distribution. This approximation allows to us…
Regular vine copulas can describe a wider array of dependency patterns than the multivariate Gaussian copula or the multivariate Student's t copula. This paper presents two contributions related to model selection of regular vine copulas. First, our pair copula family selection procedure extends existing Bayesian family selection methods by allowing pair families to be chosen from an arbitrary set of candidate families. Second, our method represents the first Bayesian model selection approach to include the regular vine density construction in its scope of inference. The merits of our approach…
Screening for ultrahigh dimensional features may encounter complicated issues such as outlying observations, heteroscedasticity or heavy-tailed distribution, multi-collinearity and confounding effects. Standard correlation-based marginal screening methods may be a weak solution to these issues. We contribute a novel robust joint screener to safeguard against outliers and distribution mis-specification for both the response variable and the covariates, and to account for external variables at the screening step. Specifically, we introduce a copula-based partial correlation (CPC) screener. We sh…
We propose a new semi-parametric distributional regression smoother that is based on a copula decomposition of the joint distribution of the vector of response values. The copula is high-dimensional and constructed by inversion of a pseudo regression, where the conditional mean and variance are semi-parametric functions of covariates modeled using regularized basis functions. By integrating out the basis coefficients, an implicit copula process on the covariate space is obtained, which we call a `regression copula'. We combine this with a non-parametric margin to define a copula model, where t…
Critical decisions frequently rely on high-dimensional output from complex computer simulation models that show intricate cross-variable, spatial and temporal dependence structures, with weather and climate predictions being key examples. There is a strongly increasing recognition of the need for uncertainty quantification in such settings, for which we propose and review a general multi-stage procedure called ensemble copula coupling (ECC), proceeding as follows: 1. Generate a raw ensemble, consisting of multiple runs of the computer model that differ in the inputs or model parameters in suit…
In probability and statistics, copulas play important roles theoretically as well as to address a wide range of problems in various application areas. We introduce the concept of multivariate discrete copulas, discuss their equivalence to stochastic arrays, and prove a multivariate discrete version of Sklar's theorem. These results provide the theoretical frame for multivariate statistical methods to postprocess weather forecasts made by ensemble systems, including the ensemble copula coupling approach and the Schaake shuffle.
Pair-copula constructions are flexible dependence models that use bivariate copulas as building blocks. In this paper, we use generalized additive models to extend them by allowing covariates effects. Borrowing ideas from a traditionally univariate context, we let each pair-copula parameter depend directly on the covariates in a parametric, semiparametric or nonparametric way. We propose a sequential estimation method that we study by simulation, and apply it to investigate the time-varying dependence structure between the intraday returns on four major foreign exchange rates. An R package, a …
This paper proposes a modelling strategy to infer the impact of a covariate on the dependence structure of right-censored clustered event time data. The joint survival function of the event times is modelled using a parametric conditional copula whose parameter depends on a cluster-level covariate in a functional way. We use a local likelihood approach to estimate the form of the copula parameter and outline a generalized likelihood ratio-type test strategy to formally test its constancy. A bootstrap procedure is employed to obtain an approximate $p$-value for the test. The performance of the …
This paper is concerned with modeling the dependence structure of two (or more) time-series in the presence of a (possible multivariate) covariate which may include past values of the time series. We assume that the covariate influences only the conditional mean and the conditional variance of each of the time series but the distribution of the standardized innovations is not influenced by the covariate and is stable in time. The joint distribution of the time series is then determined by the conditional means, the conditional variances and the marginal distributions of the innovations, which …
Rigby & Stasinopoulos (2005) introduced generalized additive models for location, scale and shape (GAMLSS) where the response distribution is not restricted to belong to the exponential family and its parameters can be specified as functions of additive predictors that allows for several types of covariate effects (e.g., linear, non-linear, random and spatial effects). In many empirical situations, however, modeling simultaneously two or more responses conditional on some covariates can be of considerable relevance. In this article, we extend the scope of GAMLSS by introducing a bivariate copu…
Capturing complex dependence structures between outcome variables (e.g., study endpoints) is of high relevance in contemporary biomedical data problems and medical research. Distributional copula regression provides a flexible tool to model the joint distribution of multiple outcome variables by disentangling the marginal response distributions and their dependence structure. In a regression setup each parameter of the copula model, i.e. the marginal distribution parameters and the copula dependence parameters, can be related to covariates via structured additive predictors. We propose a frame…
The study of dependence between random variables is the core of theoretical and applied statistics. Static and dynamic copula models are useful for describing the dependence structure, which is fully encrypted in the copula probability density function. However, these models are not always able to describe the temporal change of the dependence patterns, which is a key characteristic of financial data. We propose a novel nonparametric framework for modelling a time series of copula probability density functions, which allows to forecast the entire function without the need of post-processing pr…
We develop adaptive estimation and inference methods for high-dimensional Gaussian copula regression that achieve the same performance without the knowledge of the marginal transformations as that for high-dimensional linear regression. Using a Kendall's tau based covariance matrix estimator, an $\ell_1$ regularized estimator is proposed and a corresponding de-biased estimator is developed for the construction of the confidence intervals and hypothesis tests. Theoretical properties of the procedures are studied and the proposed estimation and inference methods are shown to be adaptive to the u…
The current statistical procedures implemented in statistical software packages for pooling of diagnostic test accuracy data include hSROC regression and the bivariate random-effects meta-analysis model (BRMA). However, these models do not report the overall mean but rather the mean for a central study with random-effect equal to zero and have difficulties estimating the correlation between sensitivity and specificity when the number of studies in the meta-analysis is small and/or when the between-study variance is relatively large. This tutorial on advanced statistical methods for meta-analys…
Multivariate time series exhibit two types of dependence: across variables and across time points. Vine copulas are graphical models for the dependence and can conveniently capture both types of dependence in the same model. We derive the maximal class of graph structures that guarantee stationarity under a natural and verifiable condition called translation invariance. We propose computationally efficient methods for estimation, simulation, prediction, and uncertainty quantification and show their validity by asymptotic results and simulations. The theoretical results allow for misspecified m…
Poverty is a multidimensional concept often comprising a monetary outcome and other welfare dimensions such as education, subjective well-being or health, that are measured on an ordinal scale. In applied research, multidimensional poverty is ubiquitously assessed by studying each poverty dimension independently in univariate regression models or by combining several poverty dimensions into a scalar index. This inhibits a thorough analysis of the potentially varying interdependence between the poverty dimensions. We propose a multivariate copula generalized additive model for location, scale a…
Copula-enhanced Vision Transformer for high myopia diagnosis through OU UWF fundus images
Department of Applied Biology；Chemical Technology, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University；Department of Data Science \& AI, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University e2；School of Data Science, Fudan University e1；Department of Applied Mathematics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University；Department of Biostatistics, City University of Hong Kong；Eye Institute；Department of Ophthalmology, Eye \& ENT Hospital, Fudan University；Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health；College of Business；Economics, Australian National University
Several procedures have been recently proposed to test the simplifying assumption for conditional copulas. Instead of considering pointwise conditioning events, we study the constancy of the conditional dependence structure when some covariates belong to general borelian conditioning subsets. Several test statistics based on the equality of conditional Kendall's tau are introduced, and we derive their asymptotic distributions under the null. When such conditioning events are not fixed ex ante, we propose a data-driven procedure to recursively build such relevant subsets. It is based on decisio…
We study factor models augmented by observed covariates that have explanatory powers on the unknown factors. In financial factor models, the unknown factors can be reasonably well explained by a few observable proxies, such as the Fama-French factors. In diffusion index forecasts, identified factors are strongly related to several directly measurable economic variables such as consumption-wealth variable, financial ratios, and term spread. With those covariates, both the factors and loadings are identifiable up to a rotation matrix even only with a finite dimension. To incorporate the explanat…
