For stationary time series with regularly varying marginal distributions, an important problem is to estimate the associated tail index which characterizes the power‐law behavior of the tail distribution. For this, various results have been developed for independent data and certain types of dependent data. In this article, we consider the problem of tail index estimation under a recently proposed notion of serial tail dependence called the tail adversarial stability. Using the technique of adversarial innovation coupling and a martingale approximation scheme, we establish the consistency and central limit theorem of the tail index estimator for a general class of tail dependent time series. Based on the asymptotic normal distribution from the obtained central limit theorem, we further consider an application to cluster a large number of regularly varying time series based on their tail indices by using a robust mixture algorithm. The results are illustrated using numerical examples including Monte Carlo simulations and a real data analysis.
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Minimum variance unbiased estimation in the presence of an adversary
Consider a setup in which a central estimator seeks to estimate an unknown deterministic parameter using measurements from multiple sensors. Some of the sensors may be adversarial in that their utility increases with the Euclidean distance between the estimate of the central estimator and their own local estimate. These sensors may misreport their measurements to the central estimator at a falsification cost. We formulate a Stackelberg game in which the central estimator acts as the leader and the adversarial sensors act as the follower. We present the optimal linear fusion scheme for the estimator and the optimal attack pattern for the adversarial sensors in the Nash equilibrium sense. Interestingly, the estimate at the central estimator may be better than if the measurements from the adversarial sensors were altogether ignored.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1739295
- PAR ID:
- 10076436
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2017 IEEE 56th Annual Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 151 to 156
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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