Partial Tail Correlation for Extremes

Abstract

In order to understand structural relationships among sets of variables at extreme levels, we develop an extremes analogue to partial correlation. We begin by developing an inner product space constructed from transformed-linear combinations of independent regularly varying random variables. We define partial tail correlation via the projection theorem for the inner product space. We show that the partial tail correlation can be understood as the inner product of the prediction errors from transformed-linear prediction. We connect partial tail correlation to the inverse of the inner product matrix and show that a zero in this inverse implies a partial tail correlation of zero. We then show that under a modeling assumption that the random variables belong to a sensible subset of the inner product space, the matrix of inner products corresponds to the previously-studied tail pairwise dependence matrix. We develop a hypothesis test for partial tail correlation of zero. We demonstrate the performance in two applications: high nitrogen dioxide levels in Washington DC and extreme river discharges in the upper Danube basin