Estimation of extreme quantiles from heavy and light tailed distributions

Abstract

In Gardes et al. (2011), a new family of distributions is introduced, depending on two parameters τ and θ, which encompasses Pareto-type distributions as well as Weibull tail-distributions. Estimators for θ and extreme quantiles are also proposed, but they both depend on the unknown parameter τ, making them useless in practical situations. In this paper, we propose an estimator of τ which is independent of θ. Plugging our estimator of τ in the two previous ones allows us to estimate extreme quantiles from Pareto-type and Weibull tail-distributions in an unified way. The asymptotic distributions of our three new estimators are established and their efficiency is illustrated on a small simulation study and on a real data set.