Discussion on Copulas in Extreme Value Theory
Organized by Thomas Mikosch
Over the last few years copulas have become popular means as probabilistic
models for describing risks. Among others, they have found applications in
financial and actuarial risk management, for example in the context of credit
risk. In 2007, copulas will become one of the models for extremes recommended
by the International Actuarial Association, see Research Report of the Insurer
Solvency Assessment Working Party of the IAA A global framework for Insurer
Solvency Assessment or U. Lindner and V. Ronkainen Solvency II- Towards a
new insurance supervisory system in the EU, Scand. Act. J., No 6, 2004.
A search on scholar.google.com gives about 10000 references to
publications containing the word "copula". Many of the references are in the context of
probabilistic copulas. A striking observation is that in almost all publications
on the topic of probabilistic copulas the authors mention that, on the one hand,
copulas are models for extremal behavior, mostly in the context of finance and
insurance. On the other hand, they do not use any "genuine" methods of
extreme value theory or extreme value statistics.
Because of this discrepancy it would be interesting to listen to what specialists
in extreme value theory have to say about the use or abuse of copulas for
modeling and statistical analyses of extremes. (In particular, since it has also
become fashionable in the EVT community to write papers with the word "copulas" in the title...)
What the author of these lines thinks about copulas, can be read in his article on
www.math.ku.dk/~mikosch/Preprint/Schaafsma.
Notice that it is not claimed in that paper that multivariate extreme value theory is
superior to using copulas, but there exist a couple of problems with the choice
of a copula model and with statistical estimation problems.
It is the aim of a one-hour-discussion during the meeting to shed some light
on the use of copulas. The author of these lines will give a short introduction
and invite some of the specialists present to comment on the correct or incorrect
use of copulas and their potential in the framework of EVT.
Thomas Mikosch
Download the paper: Copulas: Tales and Facts by Thomas Mikosch.