Abstract
In this article, we consider six estimation methods for extreme value modeling and compare their performances, focusing on the generalized Pareto distribution (GPD) in the peaks over threshold (POT) framework. Our goal is to identify the best method in various conditions via a thorough simulation study. In order to compare the estimators in the POT sense, we suggest proper strategies for some estimators originally not developed under the POT framework. The simulation results show that a nonlinear least squares (NLS) based estimator outperforms others in parameter estimation, but there is no clear winner in quantile estimation. For quantile estimation, NLS-based methods perform well even when the sample size is small and the Hill estimator comes to the front when the underlying distribution has a very heavy tail. Applications of EVT cover many different fields and researchers on each field may have their own experimental conditions or practical restrictions. We believe that our results would provide guidance on determining proper estimation method on future analysis.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Balkema, A. A., & de Haan, L. (1974). Residual life time at great age. The Annals of Probability, 2, 792–804.
Beirlant, J., Goegebeur, Y. Segers, J., & Teugels, J. (2006). Statistics of extremes: theory and applications. John Wiley & Sons.
Caeiro, F., & Gomes, M. I. (2016). Threshold selection in extreme value analysis. In Extreme value modeling and risk analysis: methods and applications (pp. 69–86).
Caires, S. (2009). A comparative simulation study of the annual maxima and the peaks-over-threshold methods. Tech. rep.. Delft University of Technology.
Castillo, E., & Hadi, A. S. (1997). Fitting the generalized pareto distribution to data. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 92, 1609–1620.
Chen, G., & Balakrishnan, N. (1995). A general purpose approximate goodness-of-fit test. Journal of Quality Technology, 27, 154–161.
de Haan, L., & Ferreira, A. (2007). Extreme value theory: an introduction. Springer Science & Business Media.
del Castillo, J., & Serra, I. (2015). Likelihood inference for generalized pareto distribution. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, 83, 116–128.
Dupuis, D. J., & Tsao, M. (1998). A hybrid estimator for generalized pareto and extreme-value distributions. Communications in Statistics—Theory and Methods, 27, 925–941.
Embrechts, P., Kliippelberg, C. & Mikosch, T. (2013). Modelling extremal events for insurance and finance. Springer Science & Business Media.
Ferreira, A., & de Haan, L. (2015). On the block maxima method in extreme value theory: PWM estimators. The Annals of Statistics, 43, 276–298.
Fisher, R. A., & Tippett, L. H. C. (1928). Limiting forms of the frequency distribution of the largest or smallest member of a sample. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 24, 180–290.
Gnedenko, B. (1943). Sur la distribution limite du terme maximum d’une serie aleatoire. Annals of Mathematics, 44, 423–453.
He, X., & Fung, W. (1999). Method of medians for lifetime data with weibull models. Statistics in Medicine, 18, 1993–2009.
Hill, B. M. (1975). A simple general approach to inference about the tail of a distribution. The Annals of Statistics, 3, 1163–1174.
Hosking, J. R., & Wallis, J. R. (1987). Parameters and quantile estimation for the generalized pareto distribution. Technometrics, 29, 339–349.
Huisman, R., Koedijk, K. G., Kool, C.J. M., & Palm, F. (2001). Tail-index estimates in small samples. Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 19, 208–216.
McNeil, A. J., Saladin, T. (1997). The peaks over thresholds method for estimating high quantiles of loss distributions. In Proceedings of 28th international ASTIN colloquium (pp. 23–43).
Park, M., & Kim, J. H. T. (2016). Estimating extreme tail risk measures with generalized pareto distribution. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, 98, 91–104.
Pickands, J. (1975). Statistical inference using extreme order statistics. The Annals of Statistics, 3, 119–131.
Song, J., & Song, S. (2012). A quantile estimation for massive data with generalized pareto distribution. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, 56, 143–150.
Wada, R., Waseda, T. & Jonathan, P. (2016). Extreme value estimation using the likelihood-weighted method. Ocean Engineering, 124, 241–251.
Wang, C., & Chen, G. (2016). A new hybrid estimation method for the generalized pareto distribution. Communications in Statistics—Theory and Methods, 45, 4285–4294.
Weissman, I. (1978). Estimation of parameters and large quantiles based on the k largest observations. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 73, 812–815.
Zhang, J. (2007). Likelihood moment estimation for the generalized pareto distribution. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics, 49, 69–77.
Zhang, J. (2010). Improving on estimation for the generalized pareto distribution. Technometrics, 52, 335–339.
Zhang, J., & Stephens, M. A. (2009). A new and efficient estimation method for the generalized pareto distribution. Technometrics, 51, 316–325.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2015S1A5B6036244).
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kang, S., Song, J. Parameter and quantile estimation for the generalized Pareto distribution in peaks over threshold framework. J. Korean Stat. Soc. 46, 487–501 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jkss.2017.02.003
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jkss.2017.02.003