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Hank Flury

Publications and source records attributed to Hank Flury.

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Constrained Fiducial Inference for Gaussian Models

We propose a new fiducial Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for fitting parametric Gaussian models. We utilize the Cayley transform to decompose the parametric covariance matrix, which in turn allows us to formulate a general data generating algorithm for Gaussian data. Leveraging constrained generalized fiducial inference, we are able to create the basis of an MCMC algorithm, which can be specified to parametric models with minimal effort. The appeal of this novel approach is the wide class of models which it permits, ease of implementation and the posterior-like fiducial distribution without the need for a prior. We provide background information for the derivation of the relevant fiducial quantities, and a proof that the proposed MCMC algorithm targets the correct fiducial distribution. We need not assume independence nor identical distribution of the data, which makes the method attractive for application to time series and spatial data. Well-performing simulation results of the MA(1) and Mat\'ern models are presented.

stat.ME

Asymptotic Theory for Estimation of the Husler-Reiss Distribution via Block Maxima Method

The H\"usler-Reiss distribution describes the limit of the pointwise maxima of a bivariate normal distribution. This distribution is defined by a single parameter, $\lambda$. We provide asymptotic theory for maximum likelihood estimation of $\lambda$ under a block maxima approach. Our work assumes independent and identically distributed bivariate normal random variables, grouped into blocks where the block size and number of blocks increase simultaneously. With these assumptions our results provide conditions for the asymptotic normality of the Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE). We characterize the bias of the MLE, provide conditions under which this bias is asymptotically negligible, and discuss how to choose the block size to minimize a bias-variance trade-off. The proofs are an extension of previous results for choosing the block size in the estimation of univariate extreme value distributions (Dombry and Ferreria 2019), providing a potential basis for extensions to multivariate cases where both the marginal and dependence parameters are unknown. The proofs rely on the Argmax Theorem applied to a localized loglikelihood function, combined with a Lindeberg-Feller Central Limit Theorem argument to establish asymptotic normality. Possible applications of the method include composite likelihood estimation in Brown-Resnick processes, where it is known that the bivariate distributions are of H\"usler-Reiss form.

math.ST