Modeling extreme events: Sample fraction adaptive choice in parameter estimation.

When modeling extreme events there are a few primordial parameters, among which we refer the extreme value index and the extremal index. The extreme value index measures the right tail-weight of the underlying distribution and the extremal index characterizes the degree of local dependence in the extremes of a stationary sequence. Most of the semi-parametric estimators of these parameters show the same type of behaviour: nice asymptotic properties, but a high variance for small values of k, the number of upper order statistics to be used in the estimation, and a high bias for large values of k. This shows a real need for the choice of k. Choosing some well-known estimators of those parameters we revisit the application of a heuristic algorithm for the adaptive choice of k. The procedure is applied to some simulated samples as well as to some real data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]