arXiv subjects

Samuel Perreault

Publications and source records attributed to Samuel Perreault.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Distributional regression for seasonal data: an application to river flows

Risk assessment in casualty insurance, such as flood risk, traditionally relies on extreme-value methods that emphasizes rare events. These approaches are well-suited for characterizing tail risk, but do not capture the broader dynamics of environmental variables such as moderate or frequent loss events. To complement these methods, we propose a modelling framework for estimating the full (daily) distribution of environmental variables as a function of time, that is a distributional version of typical climatological summary statistics, thereby incorporating both seasonal variation and gradual long-term changes. Aside from the time trend, to capture seasonal variation our approach simultaneously estimates the distribution for each instant of the seasonal cycle, without explicitly modelling the temporal dependence present in the data. To do so, we adopt a framework inspired by GAMLSS (Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale, and Shape), where the parameters of the distribution vary over the seasonal cycle as a function of explanatory variables depending only on the time of year, and not on the past values of the process under study. Ignoring the temporal dependence in the seasonal variation greatly simplifies the modelling but poses inference challenges that we clarify and overcome. We apply our framework to daily river flow data from three hydrometric stations along the Fraser River in British Columbia, Canada, and analyse the flood of the Fraser River in early winter of 2021.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2024

Inference for overparametrized hierarchical Archimedean copulas

Hierarchical Archimedean copulas (HACs) are multivariate uniform distributions constructed by nesting Archimedean copulas into one another, and provide a flexible approach to modeling non-exchangeable data. However, this flexibility in the model structure may lead to over-fitting when the model estimation procedure is not performed properly. In this paper, we examine the problem of structure estimation and more generally on the selection of a parsimonious model from the hypothesis testing perspective. Formal tests for structural hypotheses concerning HACs have been lacking so far, most likely due to the restrictions on their associated parameter space which hinders the use of standard inference methodology. Building on previously developed asymptotic methods for these non-standard parameter spaces, we provide an asymptotic stochastic representation for the maximum likelihood estimators of (potentially) overparametrized HACs, which we then use to formulate a likelihood ratio test for certain common structural hypotheses. Additionally, we also derive analytical expressions for the first- and second-order partial derivatives of two-level HACs based on Clayton and Gumbel generators, as well as general numerical approximation schemes for the Fisher information matrix.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2024

Case-crossover designs and overdispersion with application in air pollution epidemiology

Over the last three decades, case-crossover designs have found many applications in health sciences, especially in air pollution epidemiology. They are typically used, in combination with partial likelihood techniques, to define a conditional logistic model for the responses, usually health outcomes, conditional on the exposures. Despite the fact that conditional logistic models have been shown equivalent, in typical air pollution epidemiology setups, to specific instances of the well-known Poisson time series model, it is often claimed that they cannot allow for overdispersion. This paper clarifies the relationship between case-crossover designs, the models that ensue from their use, and overdispersion. In particular, we propose to relax the assumption of independence between individuals traditionally made in case-crossover analyses, in order to explicitly introduce overdispersion in the conditional logistic model. As we show, the resulting overdispersed conditional logistic model coincides with the overdispersed, conditional Poisson model, in the sense that their likelihoods are simple re-expressions of one another. We further provide the technical details of a Bayesian implementation of the proposed case-crossover model, which we use to demonstrate, by means of a large simulation study, that standard case-crossover models can lead to dramatically underestimated coverage probabilities, while the proposed models do not. We also perform an illustrative analysis of the association between air pollution and morbidity in Toronto, Canada, which shows that the proposed models are more robust than standard ones to outliers such as those associated with public holidays.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2022

Clustered Archimax Copulas

When modeling multivariate phenomena, properly capturing the joint extremal behavior is often one of the many concerns. Archimax copulas appear as successful candidates in case of asymptotic dependence. In this paper, the class of Archimax copulas is extended via their stochastic representation to a clustered construction. These clustered Archimax copulas are characterized by a partition of the random variables into groups linked by a radial copula; each cluster is Archimax and therefore defined by its own Archimedean generator and stable tail dependence function. The proposed extension allows for both asymptotic dependence and independence between the clusters, a property which is sought, for example, in applications in environmental sciences and finance. The model also inherits from the ability of Archimax copulas to capture dependence between variables at pre-extreme levels. The asymptotic behavior of the model is established, leading to a rich class of stable tail dependence functions.

math.ST↗

arXiv2022

Simultaneous computation of Kendall's tau and its jackknife variance

We present efficient algorithms for simultaneously computing Kendall's tau and the jackknife estimator of its variance. For the classical pairwise tau, we describe a modification of Knight's algorithm (originally designed to compute only tau) that does so while preserving its $O(n \log_2 n)$ runtime in the number of observations $n$. We also introduce a novel algorithm computing a multivariate extension of tau and its jackknife variance in $O(n \log_2^p n)$ time.

stat.CO↗

arXiv2020

Hypothesis tests for structured rank correlation matrices

Joint modeling of a large number of variables often requires dimension reduction strategies that lead to structural assumptions of the underlying correlation matrix, such as equal pair-wise correlations within subsets of variables. The underlying correlation matrix is thus of interest for both model specification and model validation. In this paper, we develop tests of the hypothesis that the entries of the Kendall rank correlation matrix are linear combinations of a smaller number of parameters. The asymptotic behavior of the proposed test statistics is investigated both when the dimension is fixed and when it grows with the sample size. We pay special attention to the restricted hypothesis of partial exchangeability, which contains full exchangeability as a special case. We show that under partial exchangeability, the test statistics and their large-sample distributions simplify, which leads to computational advantages and better performance of the tests. We propose various scalable numerical strategies for implementation of the proposed procedures, investigate their behavior through simulations and power calculations under local alternatives, and demonstrate their use on a real dataset of mean sea levels at various geographical locations.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2017

Detection of Block-Exchangeable Structure in Large-Scale Correlation Matrices

Correlation matrices are omnipresent in multivariate data analysis. When the number d of variables is large, the sample estimates of correlation matrices are typically noisy and conceal underlying dependence patterns. We consider the case when the variables can be grouped into K clusters with exchangeable dependence; this assumption is often made in applications, e.g., in finance and econometrics. Under this partial exchangeability condition, the corresponding correlation matrix has a block structure and the number of unknown parameters is reduced from d(d-1)/2 to at most K(K+1)/2. We propose a robust algorithm based on Kendall's rank correlation to identify the clusters without assuming the knowledge of K a priori or anything about the margins except continuity. The corresponding block-structured estimator performs considerably better than the sample Kendall rank correlation matrix when K < d. The new estimator can also be much more efficient in finite samples even in the unstructured case K = d, although there is no gain asymptotically. When the distribution of the data is elliptical, the results extend to linear correlation matrices and their inverses. The procedure is illustrated on financial stock returns.

math.ST↗