Copula models have been widely used to model the dependence between continuous random variables, but modeling count data via copulas has recently become popular in the statistics literature. Spearman's rho is an appropriate and effective tool to measure the degree of dependence between two random variables. In this paper, we derived the population version of Spearman's rho correlation via copulas when both random variables are discrete. The closed-form expressions of the Spearman correlation are obtained for some copulas of simple structure such as Archimedean copulas with different marginal distributions. We derive the upper bound and the lower bound of the Spearman's rho for Bernoulli random variables. Then, the proposed Spearman's rho correlations are compared with their corresponding Kendall's tau values. We characterize the functional relationship between these two measures of dependence in some special cases. An extensive simulation study is conducted to demonstrate the validity of our theoretical results. Finally, we propose a bivariate copula regression model to analyze the count data of a \emph{cervical cancer} dataset.
To handle the ubiquitous problem of "dependence learning," copulas are quickly becoming a pervasive tool across a wide range of data-driven disciplines encompassing neuroscience, finance, econometrics, genomics, social science, machine learning, healthcare and many more. Copula (or connection) functions were invented in 1959 by Abe Sklar in response to a query of Maurice Frechet. After 60 years, where do we stand now? This article provides a history of the key developments and offers a unified perspective.
We propose a new class of multivariate survival models based on archimedean copulas with margins modeled by the Yang and Prentice (YP) model. The Ali-Mikhail-Haq (AMH), Clayton, Frank, Gumbel-Hougaard (GH), and Joe copulas are employed to accommodate the dependency among marginal distributions. Baseline distributions are modeled semiparametrically by the piecewise exponential (PE) distribution and the Bernstein polynomials. The new class of models possesses some attractive features: i) the ability to take into account survival data with crossing survival curves; ii) the inclusion of the well-k…
Analysis of multivariate time series is a common problem in areas like finance and economics. The classical tool for this purpose are vector autoregressive models. These however are limited to the modeling of linear and symmetric dependence. We propose a novel copula-based model which allows for non-linear and asymmetric modeling of serial as well as between-series dependencies. The model exploits the flexibility of vine copulas which are built up by bivariate copulas only. We describe statistical inference techniques for the new model and demonstrate its usefulness in three relevant applicati…
Copulas are popular as models for multivariate dependence because they allow the marginal densities and the joint dependence to be modeled separately. However, they usually require that the transformation from uniform marginals to the marginals of the joint dependence structure is known. This can only be done for a restricted set of copulas, e.g. a normal copula. Our article introduces copula-type estimators for flexible multivariate density estimation which also allow the marginal densities to be modeled separately from the joint dependence, as in copula modeling, but overcomes the lack of fl…
The aim of this work is studying the use of copulas and vines in the optimization with Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs). Two EDAs are built around the multivariate product and normal copulas, and other two are based on pair-copula decomposition of vine models. Empirically we study the effect of both marginal distributions and dependence structure separately, and show that both aspects play a crucial role in the success of the optimization. The results show that the use of copulas and vines opens new opportunities to a more appropriate modeling of search distributions in EDAs.
This article extends the literature on copulas with discrete or continuous marginals to the case where some of the marginals are a mixture of discrete and continuous components. We do so by carefully defining the likelihood as the density of the observations with respect to a mixed measure. The treatment is quite general, although we focus focus on mixtures of Gaussian and Archimedean copulas. The inference is Bayesian with the estimation carried out by Markov chain Monte Carlo. We illustrate the methodology and algorithms by applying them to estimate a multivariate income dynamics model.
In actuarial research, a task of particular interest and importance is to predict the loss cost for individual risks so that informative decisions are made in various insurance operations such as underwriting, ratemaking, and capital management. The loss cost is typically viewed to follow a compound distribution where the summation of the severity variables is stopped by the frequency variable. A challenging issue in modeling such outcome is to accommodate the potential dependence between the number of claims and the size of each individual claim. In this article, we introduce a novel regressi…
This paper presents an introduction to the stochastic concepts of \emph{coupling} and \emph{copula}. Coupling means the construction of a joint distribution of two or more random variables that need not be defined on one and the same probability space, whereas a copula is a function that joins a multivariate distribution to its one-dimensional margins. Their role in stochastic modeling is illustrated by examples from multisensory perception. Pointers to more advanced and recent treatments are provided.
Joint multivariate longitudinal and time-to-event data are gaining increasing attention in the biomedical sciences where subjects are followed over time to monitor the progress of a disease or medical condition. In the insurance context, claims outcomes may be related to a policyholder's dropout or decision to lapse a policy. This paper introduces a generalized method of moments technique to estimate dependence parameters where associations are represented using copulas. A simulation study demonstrates the viability of the approach. The paper describes how the joint model provides new informat…
Implicit copulas are the most common copula choice for modeling dependence in high dimensions. This broad class of copulas is introduced and surveyed, including elliptical copulas, skew $t$ copulas, factor copulas, time series copulas and regression copulas. The common auxiliary representation of implicit copulas is outlined, and how this makes them both scalable and tractable for statistical modeling. Issues such as parameter identification, extended likelihoods for discrete or mixed data, parsimony in high dimensions, and simulation from the copula model are considered. Bayesian approaches t…
This paper proposes a novel multivariate time series model named Copula-linked univariate D-vines (CuDvine), which enables the simultaneous copula-based modeling of both temporal and cross-sectional dependence for multivariate time series. To construct CuDvine, we first build a semiparametric univariate D-vine time series model (uDvine) based on a D-vine. The uDvine generalizes the existing first-order copula-based Markov chain models to Markov chains of an arbitrary-order. Building upon uDvine, we construct CuDvine by linking multiple uDvines via a parametric copula. As a simple and tractable…
The goal of this paper is to develop a measure for characterizing complex dependence between stationary time series that cannot be captured by traditional measures such as correlation and coherence. Our approach is to use copula models of functionals of the Fourier coefficients which is a generalization of coherence. Here, we use standard parametric copula models with a single parameter both from elliptical and Archimedean families. Our approach is to analyze changes in local field potentials in the rat cortex prior to and immediately following the onset of stroke. We present the necessary the…
Vine copulas are a flexible way for modeling dependences using only pair-copulas as building blocks. However if the number of variables grows the problem gets fast intractable. For dealing with this problem Brechmann at al. proposed the truncated R-vine copulas. The truncated R-vine copula has the very useful property that it can be constructed by using only pair-wise copulas, and conditional pair-wise copulas. In our earlier papers we introduced the concept of cherry-tree copulas. In this paper we characterize the relation between the cherry-tree copulas and the truncated R-vine copulas. Both…
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…
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…
In many time-to-event studies, the event of interest is recurrent. Here, the data for each sample unit corresponds to a series of gap times between the subsequent events. Given a limited follow-up period, the last gap time might be right-censored. In contrast to classical analysis, gap times and censoring times cannot be assumed independent, i.e. the sequential nature of the data induces dependent censoring. Also, the recurrences typically vary between sample units leading to unbalanced data. To model the association pattern between gap times, so far only parametric margins combined with the r…
In many studies multivariate event time data are generated from clusters having a possibly complex association pattern. Flexible models are needed to capture this dependence. Vine copulas serve this purpose. Inference methods for vine copulas are available for complete data. Event time data, however, are often subject to right-censoring. As a consequence, the existing inferential tools, e.g. likelihood estimation, need to be adapted. A two-stage estimation approach is proposed. First, the marginal distributions are modeled. Second, the dependence structure modeled by a vine copula is estimated…
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 …
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…
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 …
Vine copulas are a flexible tool for high-dimensional dependence modeling. In this article, we discuss the generation of approximate model-X knockoffs with vine copulas. It is shown how Gaussian knockoffs can be generalized to Gaussian copula knockoffs. A convenient way to parametrize Gaussian copulas are partial correlation vines. We discuss how completion problems for partial correlation vines are related to Gaussian knockoffs. A natural generalization of partial correlation vines are vine copulas which are well suited for the generation of approximate model-X knockoffs. We discuss a specifi…
In this article, we consider the problem of reconstructing networks for continuous, binary, count and discrete ordinal variables by estimating sparse precision matrix in Gaussian copula graphical models. We propose two approaches: $\ell_1$ penalized extended rank likelihood with Monte Carlo Expectation-Maximization algorithm (copula EM glasso) and copula skeptic with pair-wise copula estimation for copula Gaussian graphical models. The proposed approaches help to infer networks arising from nonnormal and mixed variables. We demonstrate the performance of our methods through simulation studies …
In this work, we show that under specific choices of the copula, the lasso, elastic net, and $g$-prior are particular cases of `copula prior,' for regularization and variable selection method. We present `lasso with Gauss copula prior' and `lasso with t-copula prior.' The simulation study and real-world data for regression, classification, and large time-series data show that the `copula prior' often outperforms the lasso and elastic net while having a comparable sparsity of representation. Also, the copula prior encourages a grouping effect. The strongly correlated predictors tend to be in or…
Vine copulas (or pair-copula constructions) have become an important tool for high-dimensional dependence modeling. Typically, so called simplified vine copula models are estimated where bivariate conditional copulas are approximated by bivariate unconditional copulas. We present the first non-parametric estimator of a non-simplified vine copula that allows for varying conditional copulas using penalized hierarchical B-splines. Throughout the vine copula, we test for the simplifying assumption in each edge, establishing a data-driven non-simplified vine copula estimator. To overcome the curse …
This paper proposes a novel asymmetric copula based upon bivariate split normal distribution. This copula can change correlation signs of its upper and lower tails of distribution independently. As an application, it is shown by the rolling maximum likelihood estimation that the EU periphery countries changed sign of the lower tail correlation coefficient from negative to positive after the sovereign debt crisis started. In contrast, Germany had negative stock-bond correlation before and after the crisis.
Copula-based modeling has seen rapid advances in recent years. However, in big data applications, the lengthy computation time for estimating copula parameters is a major difficulty. Here, we develop a novel method to speed computation time in estimating copula parameters, using communication-free parallel computing. Our procedure partitions full data sets into disjoint independent subsets, performs copula parameter estimation on the subsets, and combines the results to produce an approximation to the full data copula parameter. We show in simulation studies that the computation time is greatl…
Vine copulas constitute a flexible way for modeling of dependences using only pair copulas as building blocks. The pair-copula constructions introduced by Joe (1997) are able to encode more types of dependences in the same time since they can be expressed as a product of different types of bi-variate copulas. The Regular-vine structures (R-vines), as pair copulas corresponding to a sequence of trees, have been introduced by Bedford and Cooke (2001, 2002) and further explored by Kurowicka and Cooke (2006). The complexity of these models strongly increases in larger dimensions. Therefore the so …
This paper extends the analysis of bivariate seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) Tobit model by modeling its nonlinear dependence structure through the Clayton copula. The ability in capturing/modeling the lower tail dependence of the SUR Tobit model where some data are censored (generally, at zero point) is an additionally useful feature of the Clayton copula. We propose a modified version of the inference function for margins (IFM) method (Joe and Xu, 1996), which we refer to as MIFM method, to obtain the estimates of the marginal parameters and a better (satisfactory) estimate of the copul…
Copulas allow to learn marginal distributions separately from the multivariate dependence structure (copula) that links them together into a density function. Vine factorizations ease the learning of high-dimensional copulas by constructing a hierarchy of conditional bivariate copulas. However, to simplify inference, it is common to assume that each of these conditional bivariate copulas is independent from its conditioning variables. In this paper, we relax this assumption by discovering the latent functions that specify the shape of a conditional copula given its conditioning variables We le…
In the field of finance, insurance, and system reliability, etc., it is often of interest to measure the dependence among variables by modeling a multivariate distribution using a copula. The copula models with parametric assumptions are easy to estimate but can be highly biased when such assumptions are false, while the empirical copulas are non-smooth and often not genuine copula making the inference about dependence challenging in practice. As a compromise, the empirical Bernstein copula provides a smooth estimator but the estimation of tuning parameters remains elusive. In this paper, by u…
Simplified vine copulas (SVCs), or pair-copula constructions, have become an important tool in high-dimensional dependence modeling. So far, specification and estimation of SVCs has been conducted under the simplifying assumption, i.e., all bivariate conditional copulas of the vine are assumed to be bivariate unconditional copulas. We introduce the partial vine copula (PVC) which provides a new multivariate dependence measure and which plays a major role in the approximation of multivariate distributions by SVCs. The PVC is a particular SVC where to any edge a j-th order partial copula is assi…
Vine copulas are pair-copula constructions enabling multivariate dependence modeling in terms of bivariate building blocks. One of the main tasks of fitting a vine copula is the selection of a suitable tree structure. For this the prevalent method is a heuristic called Dißmann's algorithm. It sequentially constructs the vine's trees by maximizing dependence at each tree level, where dependence is measured in terms of absolute Kendall's $τ$. However, the algorithm disregards any implications of the tree structure on the simplifying assumption that is usually made for vine copulas to keep infere…
Modelling and understanding directional gene networks is a major challenge in biology as they play an important role in the architecture and function of genetic systems. Copula Directional Dependence (CDD) can measure the directed connectivity among variables without any strict requirements of distributional and linearity assumptions. Furthermore, copulas can achieve that by isolating the dependence structure of a joint distribution. In this work, a novel extension of the frequentist CDD in the Bayesian setting is introduced. The new method is compared against the frequentist CDD and validated…
A2 Copula-Driven Spatial Bayesian Neural Network For Modeling Non-Gaussian Dependence: A Simulation Study
Department of Mathematics, University of Louisiana at Lafayette（数学系，路易斯安那州立大学拉斐特分校）；Department of Physical Sciences & Mathematics, West Liberty University（物理科学与数学系，韦斯特利比大学）；Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Minnesota State University（数学与统计学系，明尼苏达州立大学）；Department of Statistics, formerly of Presidency College, Kolkata, India（统计学系，原加尔各答 Presidency College）；Department of Kinesiology, University of Louisiana at Lafayette（运动科学系，路易斯安那州立大学拉斐特分校）；Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Texas Tech University（数学与统计学系，德克萨斯技术大学）；The Office of Vice President for Research, Innovation, and Economic Development, University of Louisiana at Lafayette（研究、创新与经济发展副总监办公室，路易斯安那州立大学拉斐特分校）
Vine copulas are a useful statistical tool to describe the dependence structure between several random variables, especially when the number of variables is very large. When modeling data with vine copulas, one often is confronted with a set of candidate models out of which the best one is supposed to be selected. For example, this may arise in the context of non-simplified vine copulas, truncations of vines and other simplifications regarding pair-copula families or the vine structure. With the help of distance measures we develop a parametric bootstrap based testing procedure to decide betwe…
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…
Regular vine distributions which constitute a flexible class of multivariate dependence models are discussed. Since multivariate copulae constructed through pair-copula decompositions were introduced to the statistical community, interest in these models has been growing steadily and they are finding successful applications in various fields. Research so far has however been concentrating on so-called canonical and D-vine copulae, which are more restrictive cases of regular vine copulae. It is shown how to evaluate the density of arbitrary regular vine specifications. This opens the vine copul…
Copula-based methods provide a flexible approach to build missing data imputation models of multivariate data of mixed types. However, the choice of copula function is an open question. We consider a Bayesian nonparametric approach by using an infinite mixture of elliptical copulas induced by a Dirichlet process mixture to build a flexible copula function. A slice sampling algorithm is used to sample from the infinite dimensional parameter space. We extend the work on prior parallel tempering used in finite mixture models to the Dirichlet process mixture model to overcome the mixing issue in m…
