Marginal standardization of upper semicontinuous processes. with application to max-stable processes

TL;DR

This paper develops a method for marginal standardization of upper semicontinuous stochastic processes, extending Sklar's theorem, with applications to max-stable processes with variable marginals and normalizations.

Contribution

It provides sufficient conditions for standardizing usc processes and extends Sklar's theorem to this class, enabling better modeling of max-stable processes.

Findings

Established conditions for marginal standardization of usc processes

Extended Sklar's theorem to upper semicontinuous processes

Applied results to max-stable processes with variable marginals

Abstract

Extreme-value theory for random vectors and stochastic processes with continuous trajectories is usually formulated for random objects all of whose univariate marginal distributions are identical. In the spirit of Sklar's theorem from copula theory, such marginal standardization is carried out by the pointwise probability integral transform. Certain situations, however, call for stochastic models whose trajectories are not continuous but merely upper semicontinuous (usc). Unfortunately, the pointwise application of the probability integral transform to a usc process does in general not preserve the upper semicontinuity of the trajectories. In the present work, we give sufficient conditions for marginal standardization of usc processes to be possible, and we state a partial extension of Sklar's theorem for usc processes. We specialize the results to max-stable processes whose marginal distributions and normalizing sequences are allowed to vary with the coordinate.