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This paper proposes robust estimators of the variogram, a statistical tool that is commonly used in geostatistics to capture the spatial dependence structure of data. The new estimators are based on the highly robust minimum covariance determinant estimator and estimate the directional variogram for several lags jointly. Simulations and breakdown considerations confirm the good robustness properties of the new estimators. While Genton's estimator based on the robust estimation of the variance of pairwise sums and differences performs well in case of isolated outliers, the new estimators based on robust estimation of multivariate variance and covariance matrices perform superior to the established alternatives in the presence of outlier blocks in the data. The methods are illustrated by an application to satellite data, where outlier blocks may occur because of e.g. clouds., Comment: 23 pages, 11 figures

We study the problem of modeling and inference for spatio-temporal count processes. Our approach uses parsimonious parameterisations of multivariate autoregressive count time series models, including possible regression on covariates. We control the number of parameters by specifying spatial neighbourhood structures for possibly huge matrices that take into account spatio-temporal dependencies. This work is motivated by real data applications which call for suitable models. Extensive simulation studies show that our approach yields reliable estimators., Comment: 24 pages, 16 figures and 22 tables

The occurrence of extreme events like heavy precipitation or storms at a certain location often shows a clustering behaviour and is thus not described well by a Poisson process. We construct a general model for the inter-exceedance times in between such events which combines different candidate models for such behaviour. This allows us to distinguish data generating mechanisms leading to clusters of dependent events with exponential inter-exceedance times in between clusters from independent events with heavy-tailed inter-exceedance times, and even allows us to combine these two mechanisms for better descriptions of such occurrences. We propose a modification of the Cram\'er-von Mises distance for model fitting. An application to mid-latitude winter cyclones illustrates the usefulness of our work., Comment: Authors name has changed due to a wedding

We study the problem of intervention effects generating various types of outliers in an integer-valued autoregressive model with Poisson innovations. We concentrate on outliers which enter the dynamics and can be seen as effects of extraordinary events. We consider three different scenarios, namely the detection of an intervention effect of a known type at a known time, the detection of an intervention effect of unknown type at a known time and the detection of an intervention effect when both the type and the time are unknown. We develop F-tests and score tests for the first scenario. For the second and third scenarios we rely on the maximum of the different F-type or score statistics. The usefulness of the proposed approach is illustrated using monthly data on human brucellosis infections in Greece., Comment: 70 pages, 15 figures

We present a novel approach to test for heteroscedasticity of a non-stationary time series that is based on Gini's mean difference of logarithmic local sample variances. In order to analyse the large sample behaviour of our test statistic, we establish new limit theorems for U-statistics of dependent triangular arrays. We derive the asymptotic distribution of the test statistic under the null hypothesis of a constant variance and show that the test is consistent against a large class of alternatives, including multiple structural breaks in the variance. Our test is applicable even in the case of non-stationary processes, assuming a locally stationary mean function. The performance of the test and its comparatively low computation time are illustrated in an extensive simulation study. As an application, we analyse Google Trends data, monitoring the relative search interest for the topic "global warming."

Population means and standard deviations are the most common estimands to quantify effects in factorial layouts. In fact, most statistical procedures in such designs are built towards inferring means or contrasts thereof. For more robust analyses, we consider the population median, the interquartile range (IQR) and more general quantile combinations as estimands in which we formulate null hypotheses and calculate compatible confidence regions. Based upon simultaneous multivariate central limit theorems and corresponding resampling results, we derive asymptotically correct procedures in general, potentially heteroscedastic, factorial designs with univariate endpoints. Special cases cover robust tests for the population median or the IQR in arbitrary crossed one-, two- and higher-way layouts with potentially heteroscedastic error distributions. In extensive simulations we analyze their small sample properties and also conduct an illustrating data analysis comparing children's height and weight from different countries.

Classical moment based change point tests like the cusum test are very powerful in case of Gaussian time series with one change point but behave poorly under heavy tailed distributions and corrupted data. A new class of robust change point tests based on cusum statistics of robustly transformed observations is proposed. This framework is quite flexible, depending on the used transformation one can detect for instance changes in the mean, scale or dependence of a possibly multivariate time series. Simulations indicate that this approach is very powerful in detecting changes in the marginal variance of ARCH processes and outperforms existing proposals for detecting structural breaks in the dependence structure of heavy tailed multivariate time series.

This paper considers the regional estimation of high quantiles of annual maximal river flow distributions $F$, an important problem from flood frequency analysis. Even though this particular problem has been addressed by many papers, less attention has been payed to incorporating seasonal variability and spatial dependence into the methods. We are going to discuss two regional estimators of high quantiles of local distributions $F$ that are able to deal with these important features, namely, a parametric approach based on so-called two-component extreme value distributions and a semi-parametric approach based on regional estimation of a tail index. The asymptotic normality of the estimators is derived for both procedures, which for instance enables us to account for estimation uncertainty without the need of parametric dependence models or bootstrap procedures. A comprehensive simulation study is conducted and our main findings are illustrated on river flow series from the Mulde basin in Germany, where people have suffered several times from severe floods over the last 100 years.

In panel data we observe a usually high number N of individuals over a time period T. Even if T is large one often assumes stability of the model over time. We propose a nonparametric and robust test for a change in location and derive its asymptotic distribution under short range dependence and for N, T tending to infinity. Some simulations show its usefulness under heavy tailed distributions.

We summarize properties of the spatial sign covariance matrix and especially look at the relationship between its eigenvalues and those of the shape matrix of an elliptical distribution. The explicit relationship known in the bivariate case was used to construct the spatial sign correlation coefficient, which is a non-parametric and robust estimator for the correlation coefficient within the elliptical model. We consider a multivariate generalization, which we call the multivariate spatial sign correlation matrix., Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, to be published in the conference proceedings of 11th international conference "Computer Data Analysis & Modeling 2016"

Shape constraints enable us to reflect prior knowledge in regression settings. A unimodality constraint, for example, can describe the frequent case of a first increasing and then decreasing intensity. Yet, data shapes often exhibit multiple modes. Therefore, we go beyond unimodal regression and propose modelling multimodality with piecewise unimodal regression or with deconvolution models based on unimodal peak shapes. Usefulness of unimodal regression and its multimodal extensions is demonstrated within three applications areas: marine biology, astroparticle physics and breath gas analysis. Despite this diversity, valuable results are obtained in each application. This encourages the use of these methods in other areas as well.

We propose elliptical graphical models based on conditional uncorrelatedness as a general- ization of Gaussian graphical models by letting the population distribution be elliptical instead of normal, allowing the fitting of data with arbitrarily heavy tails. We study the class of propor- tionally affine equivariant scatter estimators and show how they can be used to perform elliptical graphical modelling, leading to a new class of partial correlation estimators and analogues of the classical deviance test. General expressions for the asymptotic variance of partial correla- tion estimators, unconstrained and under decomposable models, are given, and the asymptotic chi square approximation of the pseudo-deviance test statistic is proved. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated by a simulation study, using, among others, Tyler's scatter estimator, which is distribution-free within the elliptical model. Our approach provides a robustification of Gaussian graphical modelling. The latter is likelihood-based and known to be very sensitive to model misspecification and outlying observations.

We present a robust test for change-points in time series which is based on the two-sample Hodges-Lehmann estimator. We develop new limit theory for a class of statistics based on the two-sample U-quantile processes, in the case of short range dependent observations. Using this theory we can derive the asymptotic distribution of our test statistic under the null hypothesis. We study the finite sample properties of our test via a simulation study and compare the test with the classical CUSUM test and a test based on the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney statistic.

We study subsampling estimators for the limit variance \[ \sigma^2=Var(X_1)+2 \sum_{k=2}^\infty Cov(X_1,X_k) \] of partial sums of a stationary stochastic process $(X_k)_{k\geq 1}$. We establish $L_2$-consistency of a non-overlapping block resampling method. Our results apply to processes that can be represented as functionals of strongly mixing processes. Motivated by recent applications to rank tests, we also study estimators for the series $Var(F(X_1))+2 \sum_{k=2}^\infty Cov(F(X_1),F(X_k))$, where $F$ is the distribution function of $X_1$. Simulations illustrate the usefulness of the proposed estimators and of a mean squared error optimal rule for the choice of the block length.

Generalized linear (GL-) statistics are defined as functionals of an U-quantile process and unify different classes of statistics such as U-statistics and L-statistics. We derive a central limit theorem for GL-statistics of strongly mixing sequences and arbitrary dimension of the underlying kernel. For this purpose we establish a limit theorem for U-statistics and an invariance principle for U-processes together with a convergence rate for the remaining term of the Bahadur representation. An application is given by the generalized median estimator for the tail-parameter of the Pareto distribution, which is commonly used to model exceedances of high thresholds. We use subsampling to calculate confidence intervals and investigate its behaviour under independence and strong mixing in simulations.

A new robust correlation estimator based on the spatial sign covariance matrix (SSCM) is proposed. We derive its asymptotic distribution and influence function at elliptical distributions. Finite sample and robustness properties are studied and compared to other robust correlation estimators by means of numerical simulations., Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables

We study the detection of change-points in time series. The classical CUSUM statistic for detection of jumps in the mean is known to be sensitive to outliers. We thus propose a robust test based on the Wilcoxon two-sample test statistic. The asymptotic distribution of this test can be derived from a functional central limit theorem for two-sample U-statistics. We extend a theorem of Csorgo and Horvath to the case of dependent data.