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A fundamental deficiency of classical multivariate extreme value theory is the inability to distinguish between asymptotic independence and exact independence. In this work, we examine multivariate threshold modelling in the framework of regular variation on cones. Tail dependence is described by a limiting measure, which in some cases is degenerate on joint tail regions despite strong subasymptotic dependence in such regions. Hidden regular variation, a higher-order tail decay on these regions, offers a refinement of the classical theory. We develop a representation of random vectors possessing hidden regular variation as the sum of independent regular varying components. The representation is shown to be asymptotically valid via a multivariate tail equivalence result. We develop a likelihood-based estimation procedure from this representation via a Monte Carlo expectation-maximization algorithm which has been modified for tail estimation. The method is demonstrated on simulated data and applied to air pollution measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To assess the compliance of air quality regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must know if a site exceeds a pre-specified level. In the case of ozone, the level for compliance is fixed at 75 parts per billion, which is high, but not extreme at all locations. We present a new space-time model for threshold exceedances based on the skew- t process. Our method incorporates a random partition to permit long-distance asymptotic independence while allowing for sites that are near one another to be asymptotically dependent, and we incorporate thresholding to allow the tails of the data to speak for themselves. We also introduce a transformed AR(1) time-series to allow for temporal dependence. Finally, our model allows for high-dimensional Bayesian inference that is comparable in computation time to traditional geostatistical methods for large data sets. We apply our method to an ozone analysis for July 2005, and find that our model improves over both Gaussian and max-stable methods in terms of predicting exceedances of a high level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]