Transformed-Linear Models for Time Series Extremes

Abstract: In order to capture the dependence in the upper tail of a time series, we develop non-negative regularly-varying time series models that are constructed similarly to classical non-extreme ARMA models. Rather than fully characterizing tail dependence of the time series, we define the concept of weak tail stationarity which allows us to describe a regularly-varying time series through the tail pairwise dependence function (TPDF) which is a measure of pairwise extremal dependencies. We state consistency requirements among the finite-dimensional collections of the elements of a regularly-varying time series and show that the TPDF's value does not depend on the dimension being considered. So that our models take nonnegative values, we use transformed-linear operations. We show existence and stationarity of these models, and develop their properties such as the model TPDF's. Additionally, we show the class of transformed-linear MA($\infty$) models forms an inner product space. Motivated by investigating conditions conducive to the spread of wildfires, we fit models to hourly windspeed data and find that the fitted transformed-linear models produce better estimates of upper tail quantities than traditional ARMA models or than classical linear regularly varying models.