Estimation problems for distributions with heavy tails

Zhaozhi Fan

Department of Statistics, CWRU.

Friday, October 19, at 327 Yost
Refreshments: 3:30 - 4:00 p.m, Talk: 4:00 - 5:00 p.m.

In statistical analysis and modeling we usually suppose the underlying data are normally distributed. But in many practical cases we meet outliers that transport important information. In some of these cases we say the distribution of the data set obeys a heavy-tailed distribution.
        Estimation of tail indices of heavy-tailed distributions is one of the most important task of analyzing associated data set.
        In this talk, we introduce the background of the estimation problems of tail indices, our new estimtor of the tail-index with U-statistic structure and some other estimation methods. As a special case, the estimation of parameters of the so-called $\alpha$-stable distributions will be introduced.


Questions? Nidhan Choudhuri