Subsampling (weighted smooth) empirical copula processes

A key tool to carry out inference on the unknown copula when modeling a continuous multivariate distribution is a nonparametric estimator known as the empirical copula. One popular way of approximating its sampling distribution consists of using the multiplier bootstrap. The latter is however characterized by a high implementation cost. Given the rank-based nature of the empirical copula, the classical empirical bootstrap of Efron does not appear to be a natural alternative, as it relies on resamples which contain ties. The aim of this work is to investigate the use of subsampling in the aforementioned framework. The latter consists of basing the inference on statistic values computed from subsamples of the initial data. One of its advantages in the rank-based context under consideration is that the formed subsamples do not contain ties. Another advantage is its asymptotic validity under minimalistic conditions. In this work, we show the asymptotic validity of subsampling for several (weighted, smooth) empirical copula processes both in the case of serially independent observations and time series. In the former case, subsampling is observed to be substantially better than the empirical bootstrap and equivalent, overall, to the multiplier bootstrap in terms of finite-sample performance.Comment: 34 pages, 5 figures, 4 + 8 table

A note on conditional versus joint unconditional weak convergence in bootstrap consistency results

The consistency of a bootstrap or resampling scheme is classically validated by weak convergence of conditional laws. However, when working with stochastic processes in the space of bounded functions and their weak convergence in the Hoffmann-J{\o}rgensen sense, an obstacle occurs: due to possible non-measurability, neither laws nor conditional laws are well-defined. Starting from an equivalent formulation of weak convergence based on the bounded Lipschitz metric, a classical circumvent is to formulate bootstrap consistency in terms of the latter distance between what might be called a \emph{conditional law} of the (non-measurable) bootstrap process and the law of the limiting process. The main contribution of this note is to provide an equivalent formulation of bootstrap consistency in the space of bounded functions which is more intuitive and easy to work with. Essentially, the equivalent formulation consists of (unconditional) weak convergence of the original process jointly with two bootstrap replicates. As a by-product, we provide two equivalent formulations of bootstrap consistency for statistics taking values in separable metric spaces: the first in terms of (unconditional) weak convergence of the statistic jointly with its bootstrap replicates, the second in terms of convergence in probability of the empirical distribution function of the bootstrap replicates. Finally, the asymptotic validity of bootstrap-based confidence intervals and tests is briefly revisited, with particular emphasis on the, in practice unavoidable, Monte Carlo approximation of conditional quantiles.Comment: 21 pages, 1 Figur

Detecting distributional changes in samples of independent block maxima using probability weighted moments

The analysis of seasonal or annual block maxima is of interest in fields such as hydrology, climatology or meteorology. In connection with the celebrated method of block maxima, we study several tests that can be used to assess whether the available series of maxima is identically distributed. It is assumed that block maxima are independent but not necessarily generalized extreme value distributed. The asymptotic null distributions of the test statistics are investigated and the practical computation of approximate p-values is addressed. Extensive Monte-Carlo simulations show the adequate finite-sample behavior of the studied tests for a large number of realistic data generating scenarios. Illustrations on several environmental datasets conclude the work.Comment: 36 pages, 8 table

Distribution functions of linear combinations of lattice polynomials from the uniform distribution

We give the distribution functions, the expected values, and the moments of linear combinations of lattice polynomials from the uniform distribution. Linear combinations of lattice polynomials, which include weighted sums, linear combinations of order statistics, and lattice polynomials, are actually those continuous functions that reduce to linear functions on each simplex of the standard triangulation of the unit cube. They are mainly used in aggregation theory, combinatorial optimization, and game theory, where they are known as discrete Choquet integrals and Lovasz extensions.Comment: 11 page

Goodness-of-fit testing based on a weighted bootstrap: A fast large-sample alternative to the parametric bootstrap

The process comparing the empirical cumulative distribution function of the sample with a parametric estimate of the cumulative distribution function is known as the empirical process with estimated parameters and has been extensively employed in the literature for goodness-of-fit testing. The simplest way to carry out such goodness-of-fit tests, especially in a multivariate setting, is to use a parametric bootstrap. Although very easy to implement, the parametric bootstrap can become very computationally expensive as the sample size, the number of parameters, or the dimension of the data increase. An alternative resampling technique based on a fast weighted bootstrap is proposed in this paper, and is studied both theoretically and empirically. The outcome of this work is a generic and computationally efficient multiplier goodness-of-fit procedure that can be used as a large-sample alternative to the parametric bootstrap. In order to approximately determine how large the sample size needs to be for the parametric and weighted bootstraps to have roughly equivalent powers, extensive Monte Carlo experiments are carried out in dimension one, two and three, and for models containing up to nine parameters. The computational gains resulting from the use of the proposed multiplier goodness-of-fit procedure are illustrated on trivariate financial data. A by-product of this work is a fast large-sample goodness-of-fit procedure for the bivariate and trivariate t distribution whose degrees of freedom are fixed.Comment: 26 pages, 5 tables, 1 figur

Large-sample tests of extreme-value dependence for multivariate copulas

Starting from the characterization of extreme-value copulas based on max-stability, large-sample tests of extreme-value dependence for multivariate copulas are studied. The two key ingredients of the proposed tests are the empirical copula of the data and a multiplier technique for obtaining approximate p-values for the derived statistics. The asymptotic validity of the multiplier approach is established, and the finite-sample performance of a large number of candidate test statistics is studied through extensive Monte Carlo experiments for data sets of dimension two to five. In the bivariate case, the rejection rates of the best versions of the tests are compared with those of the test of Ghoudi, Khoudraji and Rivest (1998) recently revisited by Ben Ghorbal, Genest and Neslehova (2009). The proposed procedures are illustrated on bivariate financial data and trivariate geological data.Comment: 19 page

Semiparametric estimation of a two-component mixture of linear regressions in which one component is known

A new estimation method for the two-component mixture model introduced in \cite{Van13} is proposed. This model consists of a two-component mixture of linear regressions in which one component is entirely known while the proportion, the slope, the intercept and the error distribution of the other component are unknown. In spite of good performance for datasets of reasonable size, the method proposed in \cite{Van13} suffers from a serious drawback when the sample size becomes large as it is based on the optimization of a contrast function whose pointwise computation requires O(n^2) operations. The range of applicability of the method derived in this work is substantially larger as it relies on a method-of-moments estimator free of tuning parameters whose computation requires O(n) operations. From a theoretical perspective, the asymptotic normality of both the estimator of the Euclidean parameter vector and of the semiparametric estimator of the c.d.f.\ of the error is proved under weak conditions not involving zero-symmetry assumptions. In addition, an approximate confidence band for the c.d.f.\ of the error can be computed using a weighted bootstrap whose asymptotic validity is proved. The finite-sample performance of the resulting estimation procedure is studied under various scenarios through Monte Carlo experiments. The proposed method is illustrated on three real datasets of size $n=150$, 51 and 176,343, respectively. Two extensions of the considered model are discussed in the final section: a model with an additional scale parameter for the first component, and a model with more than one explanatory variable.Comment: 43 pages, 4 figures, 5 table