Two key ingredients to carry out inference on the copula of multivariate observations are the empirical copula process and an appropriate resampling scheme for the latter. Among the existing techniques used for i.i.d. observations, the multiplier bootstrap of Rémillard and Scaillet (J. Multivariate Anal. 100 (2009) 377-386) frequently appears to lead to inference procedures with the best finite-sample properties. Bücher and Ruppert (J. Multivariate Anal. 116 (2013) 208-229) recently proposed an extension of this technique to strictly stationary strongly mixing observations by adapting the dependent multiplier bootstrap of Bühlmann (The blockwise bootstrap in time series and empirical processes (1993) ETH Zürich, Section 3.3) to the empirical copula process. The main contribution of this work is a generalization of the multiplier resampling scheme proposed by Bücher and Ruppert along two directions. First, the resampling scheme is now genuinely sequential, thereby allowing to transpose to the strongly mixing setting many of the existing multiplier tests on the unknown copula, including nonparametric tests for change-point detection. Second, the resampling scheme is now fully automatic as a data-adaptive procedure is proposed which can be used to estimate the bandwidth parameter. A simulation study is used to investigate the finite-sample performance of the resampling scheme and provides suggestions on how to choose several additional parameters. As by-products of this work, the validity of a sequential version of the dependent multiplier bootstrap for empirical processes of Bühlmann is obtained under weaker conditions on the strong mixing coefficients and the multipliers, and the weak convergence of the sequential empirical copula process is established under many serial dependence conditions. Keywords: lag window estimator; multiplier central limit theorem; multivariate observations; partial-sum process; ranks; serial dependence This is an electronic reprint of the original article published by the ISI/BS in Bernoulli, 2016, Vol. 22, No. 2, 927-968. This reprint differs from the original in pagination and typographic detail.

The empirical copula process plays a central role in the asymptotic analysis of many statistical procedures which are based on copulas or ranks. Among other applications, results regarding its weak convergence can be used to develop asymptotic theory for estimators of dependence measures or copula densities, they allow to derive tests for stochastic independence or specific copula structures, or they may serve as a fundamental tool for the analysis of multivariate rank statistics. In the present paper, we establish weak convergence of the empirical copula process (for observations that are allowed to be serially dependent) with respect to weighted supremum distances. The usefulness of our results is illustrated by applications to general bivariate rank statistics and to estimation procedures for the Pickands dependence function arising in multivariate extreme-value theory.

The empirical copula process plays a central role for statistical inference on copulas. Recently, Segers (2011) investigated the asymptotic behavior of this process under non-restrictive smoothness assumptions for the case of i.i.d. random variables. In the present paper we extend his main result to the case of serial dependent random variables by means of the powerful and elegant functional delta method. Moreover, we utilize the functional delta method in order to obtain conditional consistency of certain bootstrap procedures. Finally, we extend the results to the more general sequential empirical copula process under serial dependence.

The extremes of a stationary time series typically occur in clusters. A primary measure for this phenomenon is the extremal index, representing the reciprocal of the expected cluster size. Both a disjoint and a sliding blocks estimator for the extremal index are analyzed in detail. In contrast to many competitors, the estimators only depend on the choice of one parameter sequence. We derive an asymptotic expansion, prove asymptotic normality and show consistency of an estimator for the asymptotic variance. Explicit calculations in certain models and a finite-sample Monte Carlo simulation study reveal that the sliding blocks estimator outperforms other blocks estimators, and that it is competitive to runs-and inter-exceedance estimators in various models. The methods are applied to a variety of financial time series.

In the past decades, weak convergence theory for stochastic processes has become a standard tool for analyzing the asymptotic properties of various statistics. Routinely, weak convergence is considered in the space of bounded functions equipped with the supremum metric. However, there are cases when weak convergence in those spaces fails to hold. Examples include empirical copula and tail dependence processes and residual empirical processes in linear regression models in case the underlying distributions lack a certain degree of smoothness. To resolve the issue, a new metric for locally bounded functions is introduced and the corresponding weak convergence theory is developed. Convergence with respect to the new metric is related to epiand hypo-convergence and is weaker than uniform convergence. Still, for continuous limits, it is equivalent to locally uniform convergence, whereas under mild side conditions, it implies L p convergence. For the examples mentioned above, weak convergence with respect to the new metric is established in situations where it does not occur with respect to the supremum distance. The results are applied to obtain asymptotic properties of resampling procedures and goodness-of-fit tests.