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Ratio of Maximum to the Sum for Testing Super Heavy Tails

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Abstract

An extreme value approach to the modeling of rare and damaging events quite frequently involves heavy tailed distributions associated with power decaying tails. The positive counterpart of this power, which determines the tail heaviness of the distribution function pertaining to the sample observations, is consensually known as the tail index. In this paper, we allow the tail index $α $ to be zero so as to embrace the class of super-heavy tailed distributions. We then present a test statistic consisting of the ratio of maximum to the sum of log-excesses in order to discern between distributions with heavy and super-heavy tails. Under suitable yet reasonable assumptions, we cast an account of consistency of the Hill estimator for α equal to zero from the asymptotic features of the referred testing procedure.

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© 2008 Birkhäuser Boston

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Neves, C., Alves, I.F. (2008). Ratio of Maximum to the Sum for Testing Super Heavy Tails. In: Advances in Mathematical and Statistical Modeling. Statistics for Industry and Technology. Birkhäuser Boston. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-8176-4626-4_13

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