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Purpose

In this paper, the authors applied the empirical likelihood method, which was originally proposed by Owen, to the copula moment based estimation methods to take advantage of its properties, effectiveness, flexibility and reliability of the nonparametric methods, which have limiting chi-square distributions and may be used to obtain tests or confidence intervals. The authors derive an asymptotically normal estimator of the empirical likelihood based on copula moment estimation methods (ELCM). Finally numerical performance with a simulation experiment of ELCM estimator is studied and compared to the CM estimator, with a good result.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper we applied the empirical likelihood method which originally proposed by Owen, to the copula moment based estimation methods.

Findings

We derive an asymptotically normal estimator of the empirical likelihood based on copula moment estimation methods (ELCM). Finally numerical performance with a simulation experiment of ELCM estimator is studied and compared to the CM estimator, with a good result.

Originality/value

In this paper we applied the empirical likelihood method which originally proposed by Owen 1988, to the copula moment based estimation methods given by Brahimi and Necir 2012. We derive an new estimator of copula parameters and the asymptotic normality of the empirical likelihood based on copula moment estimation methods.

One of the main topics in multivariate statistical analysis is the statistical inference on the dependence parameter θ. Many researchers investigated the copula parameter estimation, namely the methods of concordance [1, 2] fully and the pseudo maximum likelihood [3], inference function of margins [4, 5], minimum distance [6] and recently the copula moment and L-moment based estimation methods given in [7, 8].

In this paper we applied the empirical likelihood method to the copula moment based estimation methods which originally proposed by [9–11]. Several authors investigated the empirical likelihood see for instance [12–16].

The advantage of this method is that the empirical likelihood has both effectiveness and flexibility of the likelihood method, and reliability of the non-parametric methods, and it helps us to construct confidence intervals without estimating the asymptotic variance, so the complexity of the asymptotic variance for some estimator especially the CM based estimators and the construction of non-parametric confidence intervals via estimating the asymptotic variance is usually inaccurate.

We consider the Archimedean copula family defined by C(u)=ϕ1j=1dϕ(uj), where ϕ:0,1R is a twice differentiable function called the generator, satisfying: ϕ1=0, ϕx<0, ϕx0 for any x0,1 and u=u1,,ud. The notation ϕ−1 stands for the inverse function of ϕ. Archimedean copulas are easy to construct and have nice properties. A variety of known copula families belong to this class, including the models of Gumbel, Clayton, Frank, …(see, Table 4.1 in [17], p. 116).

Let KC(s)PCUs, s0,1, be the df of rv CU, where U=U1,,Ud, then the kth-moment MkC, called copula moment, of rv CU given in [7] as the expectation of CUk, that is

(2.1)

Equation (2.1) may be rewritten into:

Suppose now, for unknown θO, that ϕ = ϕθ, it follows that C = Cθ, KC = Kθ and MkC=Mkθ, that is

from Theorem 4.3.4 in [17] we have for any s0,1, Kθ(s)=sϕθs/ϕθs, it follows that the corresponding density is Kθ(s)=ϕθsϕθs/ϕθs2. Therefore (2.1), may be rewritten into

(2.2)

In terms of ϕθ.

The non-parametric likelihood of distribution function KC of rv CU is defined by

(2.3)

Where UiUi1,,Uid. We restrict KC to the one having the probability

on each observation Ui. By a simple calculation, we find the maximizer of the non-parametric likelihood (2.3) turns to be the empirical distribution function KCn, placing probability 1/n on each observation. Therefore, similar to the parametric case, non-parametric likelihood ratio of KC to the maximizer KCn is defined by:

Suppose now that we are interested in a parameter θORr, C = Cθ and KC ≔ Kθ that the parameter θ satisfies the following equations

(2.4)

where

(2.5)

is a vector-valued function, called estimating function. Let the sample X1,,Xn from random vector X=X1,,Xd, we define the corresponding joint empirical df by

with xx1,,xd, and the marginal empirical df’s pertaining to the sample Xj1,,Xjn, from rv Xj, by

(2.6)

According to [18]; the empirical copula function is defined by

(2.7)

where Fjn1sinfx:Fjnxs denotes the empirical quantile function pertaining to df Fjn. For each j = 1, …, d, we compute U^jiFjnXji, then set

(2.8)

and for each k = 1, …, r, we compute

(2.9)

By substitution of Mk by M^k and solving system (2.4) in θ we obtain the solution θ^CMθ^1,,θ^r, called the CM estimator for θ.

Assume that the following assumptions H.1H.3 hold.

  • (1)

    H.1θ0ORr is the unique zero of the mapping θ0,1dLu;θdCθ0u which is defined from O to Rr, where Lu;θ=L1u;θ,,Lru;θ.

  • (2)

    H.2L;θ is differentiable with respect to θ with the Jacobean matrix denoted by

Lu;θ is continuous both in u and θ, and the Euclidean norm Lu;θ is dominated by a dCθ -integrable function hu.

  • (3)

    H.3 The r × r matrix A00,1dLu;θ0dCθ0u is non-singular.

Theorem 2.1.

Assume that assumptionsH.1H.3hold. Then with probability tending to one asn, the solutionθ^CMconverges toθ0. Moreover

whereD0varLξ;θ0+Vξ;θ0andVξ;θ0=V1ξ;θ0,,Vrξ;θ0with
whereξξ1,,ξdis a0,1d-uniform random vector with joint dfCθ0.
Proof.

See [7].□

Now we define the empirical likelihood ratio function for θ by

where p = (p1, …, pn). This is the maximum of the non-parametric likelihood ratio with the restriction that the mean of the estimating function is zero under the distribution Kθ.

Let, for k = 1, …, r

and

where M^k is defined in (2.9). Then, the empirical likelihood evaluated at θ is defined as

Since the Lik’s depend on Cθ, for an unknown θ, we replace them by the L^i,nk’s. Therefore, an estimated the empirical likelihood evaluated at θ is defined by

Now, by introducing a vector of Lagrange multipliers λ=λ1,,λrRr, to find the optimal pi’s i.e. maximizing

So, setting Gpi=0 gives

Therefore, the equation i=1npiGpi=0 gives γ = −n. Then, pi is given by

We have the problem that all the solutions p1,k, p2,k, …, pn,k, λk and γ are not obtained in a closed form. Note that for k = 1, 2, …, r: i=1npi,k, subject to i=1npi,k=1, attains its maximum nn at pi,k = 1/n. So we define the empirical likelihood ratio for θ as

and the corresponding empirical log-likelihood ratio is defined as

(2.10)

where the vector λ is the solution of the system of r equations given by

(2.11)

Since (2.11) is an implicit function of λ, we may solve (2.11) with respect to λ by the iterative procedure such as the Newton-Raphson optimization method or a simple grid search.

Theorem 2.2.

Assume conditionsH.1H.3hold. Then the limiting distribution ofL(θ)is a scaled chi-square distribution withrdegrees of freedom, that is,

We consider the transformed Gumbel copula given by

(3.12)

which is also a two-parameter Archimedean copula with generator ϕα,βttα1β. Here θ=α,β then r = 2, and U=U1,U2. By an elementary calculation we get the kth CM:

In particular the first two CM’s are

Then

and

Then

and

where the vector λ=λ1,λ2 satisfies two equations given by

Finally, we get

To evaluate and compare the performance of empirical likelihood for CM’s estimator is called the empirical likelihood copula moment (ELCM) estimator with the CM’s and PML’s estimator, a simulation study is carried out by considering the above example of bivariate Gumbel copula family Cα,β. The evaluation of the performance is based on the bias and the RMSE defined as follows:

(3.13)

where θ^i is an estimator (from the considered method) of θ from the ith samples for R generated samples from the underlying copula. In both parts, we selected R = 1000. To assess the improvement in the bias and RMSE of the estimators we repeat the following steps:

  • Step 1: For a given sample X1,,Xn from random vector X=X1,,Xd, we define the corresponding joint empirical df by

with xx1,,xd. For each j = 1, …, d, compute (2.8).

  • Step 2: Solve the following system for k = 1, …, r,

The obtained solution θ^ELCMθ^1,,θ^r.

For different sample sizes n with n = 50, 100, 200, 500 with increasing sample size and a large set of parameters of the true copula Cα,β. The choice of the true values of the parameter α,β has to be meaningful, in the sense that each couple of parameters assigns a value of one of the dependence measure, that is weak, moderate and strong dependence. The selected values of the true parameters are summarized in Table 1, the results are summarized in Table 2.

Table 1

The true parameters of transformed gumbel copula used for the simulation study

ταβ
Weak0.010.11.059
Moderate0.50.51.600
Strong0.80.93.450
Table 2

Bias and RMSE of ELCM estimator of two-parameter transformed gumbel copula

nτ = 0.01τ = 0.5τ = 0.8CPU
α = 0.1β = 1.059α = 0.5β = 1.6α = 0.9β = 3.45
BiasRMSEBiasRMSEBiasRMSEBiasRMSEBiasRMSEBiasRMSE
500.0470.1030.0240.1380.0330.1180.0120.2130.0360.1130.0730.3491.462 hours
1000.0230.0880.0220.1000.0190.0570.0090.1260.0210.0710.0140.2943.025 hours
2000.0090.0790.0110.0570.0070.0460.0080.0970.0040.0640.0260.1054.710 hours
5000.0030.0350.0090.0400.0010.0290.0030.0920.0020.0180.0070.1127.221 hours

From Table 2, by considering three dependence cases: weak (τ = 0.01), moderate (τ = 0.5) and strong (τ = 0.8), the performance of the ELCM estimator remains quite good in small sample size. We show that the ELCM estimator is performs better than the CM based estimator in large one. Moreover, in time-consuming point of view, we observe that for a sample size n = 30 with N = 1000 replications, the central processing unit (CPU) time to apply ELCM method took 1.442 hours, which takes approximately the same time with the PLM method and is relatively big to the CM method, which is measured in seconds 22.013. For only one replication, the CPU times (in seconds), for different sample sizes, are summarized as follows: (n, CPU) = (30, 5.2613), (100, 10.891), (200, 16.965), (500, 25.995), (see Table 3). Which opens the door to new applications in copulas estimation framework.

Table 3

Bias and RMSE of ELCM, CM and PML estimators of two-parameter transformed gumbel copula

τ = 0.01τ = 0.5τ = 0.8
α = 0.1β = 1.059α = 0.5β = 1.6α = 0.9β = 3.45
BiasRMSEBiasRMSEBiasRMSEBiasRMSEBiasRMSEBiasRMSE
n = 50
ELCM0.0490.0930.0280.1370.0310.1010.0310.2290.0390.1090.0880.356
CM−0.0750.2240.0420.121−0.0780.4520.0610.326−0.0610.742−0.2511.051
PML−0.0590.098−0.3240.3330.0600.299−0.2730.482−0.0520.5250.2411.011
n = 100
ELCM0.0230.0870.0210.1030.0210.0770.0290.1110.0310.0730.0160.299
CM−0.0350.234−0.0100.130−0.0250.4940.0140.353−0.0220.7210.1970.881
PML−0.0490.051−0.4660.470−0.0610.231−0.3270.4330.0140.3000.3190.731
n = 200
ELCM0.0110.0570.0150.0640.0130.0450.0130.0990.0170.0690.0270.109
CM−0.0200.1210.0110.1000.0290.367−0.0150.257−0.0250.5510.1550.704
PML−0.0410.038−0.2820.285−0.0810.164−0.3040.469−0.0220.157−0.0180.227
n = 500
ELCM0.0050.0370.0070.0440.0090.0310.0090.0910.0110.0100.0120.101
CM−0.0100.1020.0080.046−0.0140.2330.0110.120−0.0110.301−0.0630.423
PML−0.0400.061−0.2030.210−0.0460.100−0.3020.225−0.0190.2440.0280.200

For the proof we need the following Lemmas

Lemma 5.1.

Under the same conditions as in Theorem 2.1

Proof.

Follows straightaway from Theorem 2.1, see [7].

Lemma 5.2.

Under the same conditions as in Theorem 2.1, fork = 1, 2, …, rwe have

Proof.

(1) From the law of large number, it follows that

(2) Let

So we can write

We have

and

Hence T=Op1. It follows

The proof of Lemma 5.2 is completed.□

As showing in [19]; for k = 1, 2, …, r,

Now applying Taylor’s expansion to Lθ, we have

(5.14)

Note that from (2.11), for k = 1, 2, …, r

(5.15)

From, Lemma 5.2 it follows that for k = 1, 2, …, r

(5.16)

By (5.15) we get

Note that

then

Therefore, it follows from (5.14) and Lemmas 5.1 and (5.16) that

The proof of Theorem 2.2 is completed.

The authors are indebted to an anonymous referee for valuable remarks and suggestions.

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Published in Arab Journal of Mathematical Sciences. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

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