Confidence regions for high quantiles of a heavy tailed distribution

Estimating high quantiles plays an important role in the context of risk management. This involves extrapolation of an unknown distribution function. In this paper we propose three methods, namely, the normal approximation method, the likelihood ratio method and the data tilting method, to construct confidence regions for high quantiles of a heavy tailed distribution. A simulation study prefers the data tilting method.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053606000000416 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

On Jiang's asymptotic distribution of the largest entry of a sample correlation matrix

Let $\{X, X_{k,i}; i \geq 1, k \geq 1 \}$ be a double array of nondegenerate i.i.d. random variables and let $\{p_{n}; n \geq 1 \}$ be a sequence of positive integers such that $n/p_{n}$ is bounded away from $0$ and $\infty$. This paper is devoted to the solution to an open problem posed in Li, Liu, and Rosalsky (2010) on the asymptotic distribution of the largest entry $L_{n} = \max_{1 \leq i < j \leq p_{n}} \left | \hat{\rho}^{(n)}_{i,j} \right |$ of the sample correlation matrix ${\bf \Gamma}_{n} = \left ( \hat{\rho}_{i,j}^{(n)} \right )_{1 \leq i, j \leq p_{n}}$ where $\hat{\rho}^{(n)}_{i,j}$ denotes the Pearson correlation coefficient between $(X_{1, i},..., X_{n,i})'$ and $(X_{1, j},..., X_{n,j})'$. We show under the assumption $\mathbb{E}X^{2} < \infty$ that the following three statements are equivalent: \begin{align*} & {\bf (1)} \quad \lim_{n \to \infty} n^{2} \int_{(n \log n)^{1/4}}^{\infty} \left( F^{n-1}(x) - F^{n-1}\left(\frac{\sqrt{n \log n}}{x} \right) \right) dF(x) = 0, \\ & {\bf (2)} \quad \left ( \frac{n}{\log n} \right )^{1/2} L_{n} \stackrel{\mathbb{P}}{\rightarrow} 2, \\ & {\bf (3)} \quad \lim_{n \rightarrow \infty} \mathbb{P} \left (n L_{n}^{2} - a_{n} \leq t \right ) = \exp \left \{ - \frac{1}{\sqrt{8 \pi}} e^{-t/2} \right \}, - \infty < t < \infty \end{align*} where $F(x) = \mathbb{P}(|X| \leq x), x \geq 0$ and $a_{n} = 4 \log p_{n} - \log \log p_{n}$, $n \geq 2$. To establish this result, we present six interesting new lemmas which may be beneficial to the further study of the sample correlation matrix.Comment: 16 page