Nonparametric estimation of multivariate copula using empirical bayes method

Abstract: In the field of finance, insurance, and system reliability, etc., it is often of interest to measure the dependence among variables by modeling a multivariate distribution using a copula. The copula models with parametric assumptions are easy to estimate but can be highly biased when such assumptions are false, while the empirical copulas are non-smooth and often not genuine copula making the inference about dependence challenging in practice. As a compromise, the empirical Bernstein copula provides a smooth estimator but the estimation of tuning parameters remains elusive. In this paper, by using the so-called empirical checkerboard copula we build a hierarchical empirical Bayes model that enables the estimation of a smooth copula function for arbitrary dimensions. The proposed estimator based on the multivariate Bernstein polynomials is itself a genuine copula and the selection of its dimension-varying degrees is data-dependent. We also show that the proposed copula estimator provides a more accurate estimate of several multivariate dependence measures which can be obtained in closed form. We investigate the asymptotic and finite-sample performance of the proposed estimator and compare it with some nonparametric estimators through simulation studies. An application to portfolio risk management is presented along with a quantification of estimation uncertainty.