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Copula (statistics)

Statistical distribution for dependence between random variables

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Through Statistics, Dependent and independent variables and Random variable

Sklar's theorem states that any multivariate joint distribution can be written in terms of univariate marginal distribution functions and a copula which describes the dependence structure between the variables.

Copulas are popular in high-dimensional statistical applications as they allow one to easily model and estimate the distribution of random vectors by estimating marginals and copulas separately. There are many parametric copula families available, which usually have parameters that control the strength of dependence. Some popular parametric copula models are outlined below.

Two-dimensional copulas are known in some other areas of mathematics under the name permutons and doubly-stochastic measures.

Mathematical motivation

Consider a random vector (X1,X2,…,Xd). Suppose its marginals are continuous, i.e. the marginal CDFs Fi(x)=Pr[Xi≤x] are continuous functions. By applying the probability integral transform to each component, the random vector

(U1,U2,…,Ud)=(F1(X1),F2(X2),…,Fd(Xd))

has marginals that are uniformly distributed on the interval [0, 1].

The copula of (X1,X2,…,Xd) is defined as the joint cumulative distribution function of (U1,U2,…,Ud):

C(u1,u2,…,ud)=Pr[U1≤u1,U2≤u2,…,Ud≤ud].

The copula C contains all information on the dependence structure between the components of (X1,X2,…,Xd) whereas the marginal cumulative distribution functions Fi contain all information on the marginal distributions of Xi.

The reverse of these steps can be used to generate pseudo-random samples from general classes of multivariate probability distributions. That is, given a procedure to generate a sample (U1,U2,…,Ud) from the copula function, the required sample can be constructed as

(X1,X2,…,Xd)=(F1−1(U1),F2−1(U2),…,Fd−1(Ud)).

The generalized inverses Fi−1 are unproblematic almost surely, since the Fi were assumed to be continuous. Furthermore, the above formula for the copula function can be rewritten as:

C(u1,u2,…,ud)=Pr[X1≤F1−1(u1),X2≤F2−1(u2),…,Xd≤Fd−1(ud)].

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