COMET Flows: Towards Generative Modeling of Multivariate Extremes and Tail Dependence

COMET Flows: Towards Generative Modeling of Multivariate Extremes and Tail Dependence

Andrew McDonald, Pang-Ning Tan, Lifeng Luo

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3328-3334. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/462

Normalizing flows—a popular class of deep generative models—often fail to represent extreme phenomena observed in real-world processes. In particular, existing normalizing flow architectures struggle to model multivariate extremes, characterized by heavy-tailed marginal distributions and asymmetric tail dependence among variables. In light of this shortcoming, we propose COMET (COpula Multivariate ExTreme) Flows, which decompose the process of modeling a joint distribution into two parts: (i) modeling its marginal distributions, and (ii) modeling its copula distribution. COMET Flows capture heavy-tailed marginal distributions by combining a parametric tail belief at extreme quantiles of the marginals with an empirical kernel density function at mid-quantiles. In addition, COMET Flows capture asymmetric tail dependence among multivariate extremes by viewing such dependence as inducing a low-dimensional manifold structure in feature space. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of COMET flows in capturing both heavy-tailed marginals and asymmetric tail dependence compared to other state-of-the-art baseline architectures. All code is available at https://github.com/andrewmcdonald27/COMETFlows.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Probabilistic Machine Learning
Data Mining: Mining Spatial and/or Temporal Data
Machine Learning: Applications
Machine Learning: Unsupervised Learning
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Physical Science