Causal mechanism of extreme river discharges in the upper Danube basin network

Causal modelling of heavy-tailed variables and confounders with application to river flow

Confounding variables are a recurrent challenge for causal discovery and inference. In many situations, complex causal mechanisms only manifest themselves in extreme events, or take simpler forms in the extremes. Stimulated by data on extreme river flows and precipitation, we introduce a new causal discovery methodology for heavy-tailed variables that allows the effect of a known potential confounder to be almost entirely removed when the variables have comparable tails, and also decreases it sufficiently to enable correct causal inference when the confounder has a heavier tail. We also introduce a new parametric estimator for the existing causal tail coefficient and a permutation test. Simulations show that the methods work well and the ideas are applied to the motivating dataset.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10687-022-00456-4.

Regression-type analysis for multivariate extreme values

This paper devises a regression-type model for the situation where both the response and covariates are extreme. The proposed approach is designed for the setting where the response and covariates are modeled as multivariate extreme values, and thus contrarily to standard regression methods it takes into account the key fact that the limiting distribution of suitably standardized componentwise maxima is an extreme value copula. An important target in the proposed framework is the regression manifold, which consists of a family of regression lines obeying the latter asymptotic result. To learn about the proposed model from data, we employ a Bernstein polynomial prior on the space of angular densities which leads to an induced prior on the space of regression manifolds. Numerical studies suggest a good performance of the proposed methods, and a finance real-data illustration reveals interesting aspects on the conditional risk of extreme losses in two leading international stock markets.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10687-022-00446-6.