Statistics of Extremes and Records in Random Sequences

Book excerpt: Rare events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and floods fortunately do not occur every day, but when they do, their effects are devastating. Such rare events are particularly important in understanding and characterizing global warming and climate changes. In addition to natural catastrophes, rare events such as big financial crashes also play a significant role in the economy. In the absence of predictive models, the best way forward is to analyse the statistics of these extreme events and draw conclusions about the probability of their occurrences.Extreme value statistics (EVS) and the statistics of records in a random sequence are examples of a truly interdisciplinary topic, spanning from statistics and mathematics on one side to physics of disordered systems on the other. They have tremendous importance and practical applications in a wide variety of fields, such as climate science, finance, spin-glasses, and random matrices.Statistics and mathematical literature have explored the subject of the classical theory of EVS. However, more recently, EVS started to play a very important role in statistical physics, in particular in disordered systems. This has led to a plethora of activities, both in the statistical physics and in the mathematics communities over the last few decades. This book develops the theory of rare events, both for the classical uncorrelated as well as for correlated sequences, in terms of simple models and examples. Statistics of Extremes and Records in Random Sequences is a pedagogical book with examples illustrating the basic tools and techniques that are essential to a student starting to work in this interesting and rapidly developing field.