Book Description

The goal of this thesis is to treat the temporal tail dependence and the cross-sectional tail dependence of heavy tailed functional time series. Functional time series are aimed at modelling spatio-temporal phenomena; for instance rain, temperature, pollution on a given geographical area, with temporally dependent observations. Heavy tails mean that the series can exhibit much higher spikes than with Gaussian distributions for instance. In such cases, second moments cannot be assumed to exist, violating the basic assumption in standard functional data analysis based on the sequence of autocovariance operators. As for random variables, regular variation provides the mathematical backbone for a coherent theory of extreme values. The main tools introduced in this thesis for a regularly varying functional time series are its tail process and its spectral process. These objects capture all the aspects of the probability distribution of extreme values jointly over time and space. The development of the tail and spectral process for heavy tailed functional time series is followed by three theoretical applications. The first application is a characterization of a variety of indices and objects describing the extremal behavior of the series: the extremal index, tail dependence coefficients, the extremogram and the point process of extremes. The second is the computation of an explicit expression of the tail and spectral processes for heavy tailed linear functional time series. The third and final application is the introduction and the study of a model for the spatio-temporal dependence for functional time series called maxima of moving maxima of continuous functions (CM3 processes), with the development of an estimation method.