In this paper we shall be interested in two questions on extremes relating to world records in athletics. The first question is: what is the ultimate world record in a specific athletics event (such as the 100m for men or the high jump for women), given today's state of the art? Our second...

Bayesian model averaging attempts to combine parameter estimation and model uncertainty in one coherent framework. The choice of prior is then critical. Within an explicit framework of ignorance we define a ‘suitable' prior as one which leads to a continuous and suitable analog to the pretest...

Consider a random sample from a continuous multivariate distribution function F with copula C. In order to test the null hypothesis that C belongs to a certain parametric family, we construct an under H0 asymptotically distribution-free process that serves as a tests generator. The process is a...

Let (X1, Y1), … , (Xn, Yn) be an i.i.d. sample from a bivariate distribution function that lies in the max-domain of attraction of an extreme value distribution. The asymptotic joint distribution of the standardized component-wise maxima max( Xi) and max(Yi) is then characterized by the...

A novel, general two-sample hypothesis testing procedure is established for testing the equality of tail copulas associated with bivariate data. More precisely, using an ingenious transformation of a natural two-sample tail copula process, a test process is constructed, which is shown to...