Detecting distributional changes in samples of independent block maxima using probability weighted moments

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Abstract: The analysis of seasonal or annual block maxima is of interest in fields such as hydrology, climatology or meteorology. In connection with the celebrated method of block maxima, we study several tests that can be used to assess whether the available series of maxima is identically distributed. It is assumed that block maxima are independent but not necessarily generalized extreme value distributed. The asymptotic null distributions of the test statistics are investigated and the practical computation of approximate p-values is addressed. Extensive Monte-Carlo simulations show the adequate finite-sample behavior of the studied tests for a large number of realistic data generating scenarios. Illustrations on several environmental datasets conclude the work.


The block maxima (BM) method in extreme value theory is a useful tool in the analysis of data in climatology, hydrology and meteorology. Statistical properties of maximum likelihood estimators and probability weighted moments (PWM) are considered by several authors. In the present paper, the question of distributional changes is investigated: The block maxima approach consists of observation period into nonoverlapping periods; the new observations are the maxima in each period. The distribution of these block maxima is modeled by the generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution. The question arises, whether the maxima have all the same distribution or not. To answer this question the authors propose test statistics which are related to the CUSUM statistics for the change-point detection. To formulate the test procedures the PWM method is recalled and generalized. The authors derive the limit distribution of the test statistics under the null hypothesis -- a result on the weak convergence of the sequential weighted uniform empirical process and of certain sequential empirical processes constructed from the PWM estimators. Based on this limit statement the computation of the \(p\)-values is discussed. Monte Carlo experiments demonstrate the finite-sample properties of the proposed test procedures. Further, the test is applied to real climate data.





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