A Practical Guide To Heavy Tails

Twenty-four contributions, intended for a wide audience from various disciplines, cover a variety of applications of heavy-tailed modeling involving telecommunications, the Web, insurance, and finance. Along with discussion of specific applications are several papers devoted to time series analysis, regression, classical signal/noise detection problems, and the general structure of stable processes, viewed from a modeling standpoint. Emphasis is placed on developments in handling the numerical problems associated with stable distribution (a main technical difficulty until recently). No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Handbooks in Finance are intended to be a definitive source for comprehensive and accessible information in the field of finance. Each individual volume in the series should present an accurate self-contained survey of a sub-field of finance, suitable for use by finance and economics professors and lecturers, professional researchers, graduate students and as a teaching supplement. The goal is to have a broad group of outstanding volumes in various areas of finance. The Handbook of Heavy Tailed Distributions in Finance is the first handbook to be published in this series. This volume presents current research focusing on heavy tailed distributions in finance. The contributions cover methodological issues, i.e., probabilistic, statistical and econometric modelling under non- Gaussian assumptions, as well as the applications of the stable and other non -Gaussian models in finance and risk management.

An accessible yet rigorous package of probabilistic and statistical tools for anyone who must understand or model extreme events.

This book is written to help graduate students and young researchers to enter quickly into the subject of Risk Theory. It can also be used by actuaries and financial practitioners for the optimization of their decisions and further by regulatory authorities for the stabilization of the insurance industry. The topic of extreme claims is especially presented as a crucial feature of the modern ruin probability.

Heavy-tailed probability distributions are an important component in the modeling of many stochastic systems. They are frequently used to accurately model inputs and outputs of computer and data networks and service facilities such as call centers. They are an essential for describing risk processes in finance and also for insurance premia pricing, and such distributions occur naturally in models of epidemiological spread. The class includes distributions with power law tails such as the Pareto, as well as the lognormal and certain Weibull distributions. One of the highlights of this new edition is that it includes problems at the end of each chapter. Chapter 5 is also updated to include interesting applications to queueing theory, risk, and branching processes. New results are presented in a simple, coherent and systematic way. Graduate students as well as modelers in the fields of finance, insurance, network science and environmental studies will find this book to be an essential reference.

The study of heavy-tailed distributions allows researchers to represent phenomena that occasionally exhibit very large deviations from the mean. The dynamics underlying these phenomena is an interesting theoretical subject, but the study of their statistical properties is in itself a very useful endeavor from the point of view of managing assets and controlling risk. In this book, the authors are primarily concerned with the statistical properties of heavy-tailed distributions and with the processes that exhibit jumps. A detailed overview with a Matlab implementation of heavy-tailed models applied in asset management and risk managements is presented. The book is not intended as a theoretical treatise on probability or statistics, but as a tool to understand the main concepts regarding heavy-tailed random variables and processes as applied to real-world applications in finance. Accordingly, the authors review approaches and methodologies whose realization will be useful for developing new methods for forecasting of financial variables where extreme events are not treated as anomalies, but as intrinsic parts of the economic process.

Heavy-tailed distributions are typical for phenomena in complex multi-component systems such as biometry, economics, ecological systems, sociology, web access statistics, internet traffic, biblio-metrics, finance and business. The analysis of such distributions requires special methods of estimation due to their specific features. These are not only the slow decay to zero of the tail, but also the violation of Cramer’s condition, possible non-existence of some moments, and sparse observations in the tail of the distribution. The book focuses on the methods of statistical analysis of heavy-tailed independent identically distributed random variables by empirical samples of moderate sizes. It provides a detailed survey of classical results and recent developments in the theory of nonparametric estimation of the probability density function, the tail index, the hazard rate and the renewal function. Both asymptotical results, for example convergence rates of the estimates, and results for the samples of moderate sizes supported by Monte-Carlo investigation, are considered. The text is illustrated by the application of the considered methodologies to real data of web traffic measurements.

This book provides a compact and systematic overview of closure properties of heavy-tailed and related distributions, including closure under tail equivalence, convolution, finite mixing, maximum, minimum, convolution power and convolution roots, and product-convolution closure. It includes examples and counterexamples that give an insight into the theory and provides numerous references to technical details and proofs for a deeper study of the subject. The book will serve as a useful reference for graduate students, young researchers, and applied scientists.