scholarly journals Non-stationary Extreme Value Analysis: a simplified approach for Earth science applications

Author(s):  
Lorenzo Mentaschi ◽  
Michalis Vousdoukas ◽  
Evangelos Voukouvalas ◽  
Ludovica Sartini ◽  
Luc Feyen ◽  
...  

Abstract. Statistical approaches to study extreme events require by definition long time series of data. The climate is subject to natural and anthropogenic variations at different temporal scales, leaving their footprint on the frequency and intensity of climatic and hydrological extremes, therefore assumption of stationarity is violated and alternative methods to conventional stationary Extreme Value Analysis (EVA) need to be adopted. In this study we introduce the Transformed-Stationary (TS) methodology for non-stationary EVA. This approach consists in (i) transforming a non-stationary time series into a stationary one to which the stationary EVA theory can be applied; and (ii) reverse-transforming the result into a non-stationary extreme value distribution. As a transformation we propose and discuss a simple time-varying normalization of the signal and show that it allows a comprehensive formulation of non stationary GEV/GPD models with constant shape parameter. A validation of the methodology is carried out on time series of significant wave height, residual water level, and river discharge, which show varying degrees of long-term and seasonal variability. The results from the proposed approach are comparable with the ones from (a) a stationary EVA on quasi-stationary slices of non stationary series and (b) the previously applied non stationary EVA approach. However, the proposed technique comes with advantages in both cases, as in contrast to (a) it uses the whole time horizon of the series for the estimation of the extremes, allowing for a more accurate estimation of large return levels; and with respect to (b) it decouples the detection of non-stationary patterns from the fitting of the extreme values distribution. As a result the steps of the analysis are simplified and intermediate diagnostics are possible. In particular the transformation can be carried out by means of simple statistical techniques such as low-pass filters based on running mean and standard deviation, and the fitting procedure is a stationary one with a few degrees of freedom and easy to implement and control. An open-source MATLAB toolbox has been developed to cover this methodology, available at https://bitbucket.org/menta78/tseva.

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (9) ◽  
pp. 3527-3547 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Mentaschi ◽  
Michalis Vousdoukas ◽  
Evangelos Voukouvalas ◽  
Ludovica Sartini ◽  
Luc Feyen ◽  
...  

Abstract. Statistical approaches to study extreme events require, by definition, long time series of data. In many scientific disciplines, these series are often subject to variations at different temporal scales that affect the frequency and intensity of their extremes. Therefore, the assumption of stationarity is violated and alternative methods to conventional stationary extreme value analysis (EVA) must be adopted. Using the example of environmental variables subject to climate change, in this study we introduce the transformed-stationary (TS) methodology for non-stationary EVA. This approach consists of (i) transforming a non-stationary time series into a stationary one, to which the stationary EVA theory can be applied, and (ii) reverse transforming the result into a non-stationary extreme value distribution. As a transformation, we propose and discuss a simple time-varying normalization of the signal and show that it enables a comprehensive formulation of non-stationary generalized extreme value (GEV) and generalized Pareto distribution (GPD) models with a constant shape parameter. A validation of the methodology is carried out on time series of significant wave height, residual water level, and river discharge, which show varying degrees of long-term and seasonal variability. The results from the proposed approach are comparable with the results from (a) a stationary EVA on quasi-stationary slices of non-stationary series and (b) the established method for non-stationary EVA. However, the proposed technique comes with advantages in both cases. For example, in contrast to (a), the proposed technique uses the whole time horizon of the series for the estimation of the extremes, allowing for a more accurate estimation of large return levels. Furthermore, with respect to (b), it decouples the detection of non-stationary patterns from the fitting of the extreme value distribution. As a result, the steps of the analysis are simplified and intermediate diagnostics are possible. In particular, the transformation can be carried out by means of simple statistical techniques such as low-pass filters based on the running mean and the standard deviation, and the fitting procedure is a stationary one with a few degrees of freedom and is easy to implement and control. An open-source MATLAB toolbox has been developed to cover this methodology, which is available at https://github.com/menta78/tsEva/ (Mentaschi et al., 2016).


2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (5) ◽  
pp. 873-888 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesús Portilla-Yandún ◽  
Edwin Jácome

AbstractAn important requirement in extreme value analysis (EVA) is for the working variable to be identically distributed. However, this is typically not the case in wind waves, because energy components with different origins belong to separate data populations, with different statistical properties. Although this information is available in the wave spectrum, the working variable in EVA is typically the total significant wave height Hs, a parameter that does not contain information of the spectral energy distribution, and therefore does not fulfill this requirement. To gain insight in this aspect, we develop here a covariate EVA application based on spectral partitioning. We observe that in general the total Hs is inappropriate for EVA, leading to potential over- or underestimation of the projected extremes. This is illustrated with three representative cases under significantly different wave climate conditions. It is shown that the covariate analysis provides a meaningful understanding of the individual behavior of the wave components, in regard to the consequences for projecting extreme values.


2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-220
Author(s):  
Jingjing Zou ◽  
Richard A. Davis ◽  
Gennady Samorodnitsky

AbstractIn this paper, we are concerned with the analysis of heavy-tailed data when a portion of the extreme values is unavailable. This research was motivated by an analysis of the degree distributions in a large social network. The degree distributions of such networks tend to have power law behavior in the tails. We focus on the Hill estimator, which plays a starring role in heavy-tailed modeling. The Hill estimator for these data exhibited a smooth and increasing “sample path” as a function of the number of upper order statistics used in constructing the estimator. This behavior became more apparent as we artificially removed more of the upper order statistics. Building on this observation we introduce a new version of the Hill estimator. It is a function of the number of the upper order statistics used in the estimation, but also depends on the number of unavailable extreme values. We establish functional convergence of the normalized Hill estimator to a Gaussian process. An estimation procedure is developed based on the limit theory to estimate the number of missing extremes and extreme value parameters including the tail index and the bias of Hill's estimator. We illustrate how this approach works in both simulations and real data examples.


Author(s):  
Szilárd Bozóki ◽  
András Pataricza

Proper timeliness is vital for a lot of real-world computing systems. Understanding the phenomena of extreme workloads is essential because unhandled, extreme workloads could cause violation of timeliness requirements, service degradation, and even downtime. Extremity can have multiple roots: (1) service requests can naturally produce extreme workloads; (2) bursts could randomly occur on a probabilistic basis in case of a mixed workload in multiservice systems; (3) workload spikes typically happen in deadline bound tasks.Extreme Value Analysis (EVA) is a statistical method for modeling the extremely deviant values corresponding to the largest values. The foundation mathematics of EVA, the Extreme Value Theorem, requires the dataset to be independent and identically distributed. However, this is not generally true in practice because, usually, real-life processes are a mixture of sources with identifiable patterns. For example, seasonality and periodic fluctuations are regularly occurring patterns. Deadlines can be purely periodic, e.g., monthly tax submissions, or time variable, e.g., university homework submission with variable semester time schedules.We propose to preprocess the data using time series decomposition to separate the stochastic process causing extreme values. Moreover, we focus on the case where the root cause of the extreme values is the same mechanism: a deadline. We exploit known deadlines using dynamic time warp to search for the recurring similar workload peak patterns varying in time and amplitude.


Atmosphere ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 1273
Author(s):  
Tosiyuki Nakaegawa ◽  
Takuro Kobashi ◽  
Hirotaka Kamahori

Extreme precipitation is no longer stationary under a changing climate due to the increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Nonstationarity must be considered when realistically estimating the amount of extreme precipitation for future prevention and mitigation. Extreme precipitation with a certain return level is usually estimated using extreme value analysis under a stationary climate assumption without evidence. In this study, the characteristics of extreme value statistics of annual maximum monthly precipitation in East Asia were evaluated using a nonstationary historical climate simulation with an Earth system model of intermediate complexity, capable of long-term integration over 12,000 years (i.e., the Holocene). The climatological means of the annual maximum monthly precipitation for each 100-year interval had nonstationary time series, and the ratios of the largest annual maximum monthly precipitation to the climatological mean had nonstationary time series with large spike variations. The extreme value analysis revealed that the annual maximum monthly precipitation with a return level of 100 years estimated for each 100-year interval also presented a nonstationary time series which was normally distributed and not autocorrelated, even with the preceding and following 100-year interval (lag 1). Wavelet analysis of this time series showed that significant periodicity was only detected in confined areas of the time–frequency space.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikos Koutsias ◽  
Frank A. Coutelieris

<p>A statistical analysis on the wildfire events, that have taken place in Greece during the period 1985-2007, for the assessment of the extremes has been performed. The total burned area of each fire was considered here as a key variable to express the significance of a given event. The data have been analyzed through the extreme value theory, which has been in general proved a powerful tool for the accurate assessment of the return period of extreme events. Both frequentist and Bayesian approaches have been used for comparison and evaluation purposes. Precisely, the Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution along with Peaks over Threshold (POT) have been compared with the Bayesian Extreme Value modelling. Furthermore, the correlation of the burned area with the potential extreme values for other key parameters (e.g. wind, temperature, humidity, etc.) has been also investigated.</p>


2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (21) ◽  
pp. 8819-8842 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Meucci ◽  
Ian R. Young ◽  
Øyvind Breivik

The present work develops an innovative approach to wind speed and significant wave height extreme value analysis. The approach is based on global atmosphere–wave model ensembles, the members of which are propagated in time from the best estimate of the initial state, with slight perturbations to the initial conditions, to estimate the uncertainties connected to model representations of reality. The low correlation of individual ensemble member forecasts at advanced lead times guarantees their independence and allows us to perform inference statistics. The advantage of ensemble probabilistic forecasts is that it is possible to synthesize an equivalent dataset of duration far longer than the simulation period. This allows the use of direct inference statistics to obtain extreme value estimates. A short time series of six years (from 2010 to 2016) of ensemble forecasts is selected to avoid major changes to the model physics and resolution and thus ensure stationarity. This time series is used to undertake extreme value analysis. The study estimates global wind speed and wave height return periods by selecting peaks from ensemble forecasts from +216- to +240-h lead time from the operational ensemble forecast dataset of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). The results are compared with extreme value analyses performed on a commonly used reanalysis dataset, ERA-Interim, and buoy data. The comparison with traditional methods demonstrates the potential of this novel approach for statistical analysis of significant wave height and wind speed ocean extremes at the global scale.


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