Rolf-Dieter Reiss

This book is designed as a unified and mathematically rigorous treatment of some recent developments of the asymptotic distribution theory of order statistics (including the extreme order statistics) that are relevant for statistical theory and its applications. Particular emphasis is placed on results concern­ ing the accuracy oflimit theorems, on higher order approximations, and other approximations in quite a general sense. Contrary to the classical limit theorems that primarily concern the weak convergence of distribution functions, our main results will be formulated in terms of the variational and the Hellinger distance. These results will form the proper springboard for the investigation of parametric approximations of nonparametric models of joint distributions of order statistics. The approxi­ mating models include normal as well as extreme value models. Several applications will show the usefulness of this approach. Other recent developments in statistics like nonparametric curve estima­ tion and the bootstrap method will be studied as far as order statistics are concerned. 1n connection with this, graphical methods will, to some extent, be explored.

Since the publication of the first edition of this seminar book in 1994, the theory and applications of extremes and rare events have enjoyed an enormous and still increasing interest. The intention of the book is to give a mathematically oriented development of the theory of rare events underlying various applications. This characteristic of the book was strengthened in the second edition by incorporating various new results. In this third edition, the dramatic change of focus of extreme value theory has been taken into account: from concentrating on maxima of observations it has shifted to large observations, defined as exceedances over high thresholds. One emphasis of the present third edition lies on multivariate generalized Pareto distributions, their representations, properties such as their peaks-over-threshold stability, simulation, testing and estimation. Reviews of the 2nd edition: "In brief, it is clear that this will surely be a valuable resource for anyone involved in, or seeking to master, the more mathematical features of this field." David Stirzaker, Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society "Laws of Small Numbers can be highly recommended to everyone who is looking for a smooth introduction to Poisson approximations in EVT and other fields of probability theory and statistics. In particular, it offers an interesting view on multivariate EVT and on EVT for non-iid observations, which is not presented in a similar way in any other textbook." Holger Drees, Metrika

The statistical analysis of extreme data is important for various disciplines, including hydrology, insurance, finance, engineering and environmental sciences. This book provides a self-contained introduction to the parametric modeling, exploratory analysis and statistical interference for extreme values. The entire text of this third edition has been thoroughly updated and rearranged to meet the new requirements. Additional sections and chapters, elaborated on more than 100 pages, are particularly concerned with topics like dependencies, the conditional analysis and the multivariate modeling of extreme data. Parts I–III about the basic extreme value methodology remain unchanged to some larger extent, yet notable are, e.g., the new sections about "An Overview of Reduced-Bias Estimation" (co-authored by M. I. Gomes), "The Spectral Decomposition Methodology", and "About Tail Independence" (co-authored by M. Frick), and the new chapter about "Extreme Value Statistics of Dependent Random Variables" (co-authored by H. Drees). Other new topics, e.g., a chapter about "Environmental Sciences", (co--authored by R. W. Katz), are collected within Parts IV–VI. Related software is available for free download on extras.springer.com.