Marginal standardization of upper semicontinuous processes. With application to max-stable processes

Extreme value theory for random vectors and stochastic processes with continuous trajectories is usually formulated for random objects where the univariate marginal distributions are identical. In the spirit of Sklar's theorem from copula theory, such marginal standardization is carried out by the pointwise probability integral transform. Certain situations, however, call for stochastic models whose trajectories are not continuous but merely upper semicontinuous (USC). Unfortunately, the pointwise application of the probability integral transform to a USC process does not, in general, preserve the upper semicontinuity of the trajectories. In this paper we give sufficient conditions to enable marginal standardization of USC processes and we state a partial extension of Sklar's theorem for USC processes. We specialize the results to max-stable processes whose marginal distributions and normalizing sequences are allowed to vary with the coordinate.