We derive some key extremal features for stationary kth-order Markov chains that can be used to understand how the process moves between an extreme state and the body of the process. The chains are studied given that there is an exceedance of a threshold, as the threshold tends to the upper endpoint of the distribution. Unlike previous studies with $k>1$, we consider processes where standard limit theory describes each extreme event as a single observation without any information about the transition to and from the body of the distribution. Our work uses different asymptotic theory which results in non-degenerate limit laws for such processes. We study the extremal properties of the initial distribution and the transition probability kernel of the Markov chain under weak assumptions for broad classes of extremal dependence structures that cover both asymptotically dependent and asymptotically independent Markov chains. For chains with $k>1$, the transition of the chain away from the exceedance involves novel functions of the k previous states, in comparison to just the single value, when $k=1$. This leads to an increase in the complexity of determining the form of this class of functions, their properties, and the method of their derivation in applications. We find that it is possible to derive an affine normalization, dependent on the threshold excess, such that non-degenerate limiting behaviour of the process, in the neighbourhood of the threshold excess, is assured for all lags. We find that these normalization functions have an attractive structure that has parallels to the Yule–Walker equations. Furthermore, the limiting process is always linear in the innovations. We illustrate the results with the study of kth-order stationary Markov chains with exponential margins based on widely studied families of copula dependence structures.

For a non-negative separable random field Z(t), $t\in \mathbb{R}^d$ , satisfying some mild assumptions, we show that $ H_Z^\delta =\lim_{{T} \to \infty} ({1}/{T^d}) \mathbb{E}\{{\sup_{ t\in [0,T]^d \cap \delta \mathbb{Z}^d } Z(t) }\} <\infty$ for $\delta \ge 0$ , where $0 \mathbb{Z}^d\,:\!=\,\mathbb{R}^d$ , and prove that $H_Z^0$ can be approximated by $H_Z^\delta$ if $\delta$ tends to 0. These results extend the classical findings for Pickands constants $H_{Z}^\delta$ , defined for $Z(t)= \exp( \sqrt{ 2} B_\alpha (t)- \lvert {t} \rvert^{2\alpha })$ , $t\in \mathbb{R}$ , with $B_\alpha$ a standard fractional Brownian motion with Hurst parameter $\alpha \in (0,1]$ . The continuity of $H_{Z}^\delta$ at $\delta=0$ is additionally shown for two particular extensions of Pickands constants.

Let $\{X_{\textbf{n}} \colon \textbf{n}\in{\mathbb Z}^d\}$ be a weakly dependent stationary random field with maxima $M_{A} :=, \sup\{X_{\textbf{i}} \colon \textbf{i}\in A\}$ for finite $A\subset{\mathbb Z}^d$ and $M_{\textbf{n}} := \sup\{X_{\textbf{i}} \colon \mathbf{1} \leq \textbf{i} \leq \textbf{n} \}$ for $\textbf{n}\in{\mathbb N}^d$ . In a general setting we prove that ${\mathbb{P}}(M_{(N_1(n),N_2(n),\ldots, N_d(n))} \leq v_n)$ $= \exp(\!- n^d {\mathbb{P}}(X_{\mathbf{0}} > v_n , M_{A_n} \leq v_n)) + {\text{o}}(1)$ for some increasing sequence of sets $A_n$ of size $ {\text{o}}(n^d)$ , where $(N_1(n),N_2(n), \ldots,N_d(n))\to(\infty,\infty, \ldots, \infty)$ and $N_1(n)N_2(n)\cdots N_d(n)\sim n^d$ . The sets $A_n$ are determined by a translation-invariant total order $\preccurlyeq$ on ${\mathbb Z}^d$ . For a class of fields satisfying a local mixing condition, including m-dependent ones, the main theorem holds with a constant finite A replacing $A_n$ . The above results lead to new formulas for the extremal index for random fields. The new method for calculating limiting probabilities for maxima is compared with some known results and applied to the moving maximum field.

Let {X(s, t): s, t ≥ 0} be a centred homogeneous Gaussian field with almost surely continuous sample paths and correlation function r(s, t) = cov(X(s, t), X(0, 0)) such that r(s, t) = 1 - |s|α1 - |t|α2 + o(|s|α1 + |t|α2), s, t → 0, with α1, α2 ∈ (0, 2], and r(s, t) < 1 for (s, t) ≠ (0, 0). In this contribution we derive an asymptotic expansion (as u → ∞) of P(sup(sn1(u),tn2(u)) ∈[0,x]∙[0,y]X(s, t) ≤ u), where n1(u)n2(u) = u2/α1+2/α2Ψ(u), which holds uniformly for (x, y) ∈ [A, B]2 with A, B two positive constants and Ψ the survival function of an N(0, 1) random variable. We apply our findings to the analysis of extremes of homogeneous Gaussian fields over more complex parameter sets and a ball of random radius. Additionally, we determine the extremal index of the discretised random field determined by X(s, t).

We investigate the asymptotic distribution of the number of exceedances among d identically distributed but not necessarily independent random variables (RVs) above a sequence of increasing thresholds, conditional on the assumption that there is at least one exceedance. Our results enable the computation of the fragility index, which represents the expected number of exceedances, given that there is at least one exceedance. Computed from the first d RVs of a strictly stationary sequence, we show that, under appropriate conditions, the reciprocal of the fragility index converges to the extremal index corresponding to the stationary sequence as d increases.

For stationary sequences X = {Xn}n≥1 we relate τ, the limiting mean number of exceedances of high levels un by X1,…,Xn, and ν, the limiting mean number of upcrossings of the same level, through the expression θ = (ν/τ)η, where θ is the extremal index of X and η is a new parameter here called the upcrossings index. The upcrossings index is a measure of the clustering of upcrossings of u by variables in X, and the above relation extends the known relation θ = ν/τ, which holds under the mild-oscillation local restriction D″(u) on X. We present a new family of local mixing conditions D̃(k)(u) under which we prove that (a) the intensity of the limiting point process of upcrossings and η can both be computed from the k-variate distributions of X; and (b) the cluster size distributions for the exceedances are asymptotically equivalent to those for the lengths of one run of exceedances or the lengths of several consecutive runs which are separated by at most k − 2 nonexceedances and, except for the last one, each contain at most k − 2 exceedances.

Random fields on , with long-range weak dependence for each coordinate individually, usually present clustering of high values. For each one of the eight directions in , we formulate restriction conditions on local occurrence of two or more crossings of high levels. These smooth oscillation conditions enable computation of the extremal index as a clustering measure from the limiting mean number of crossings. In fact, only four directions must be inspected since for opposite directions we find the same local path crossing behaviour and the same limiting mean number of crossings. The general theory is illustrated with several 1-dependent nonstationary random fields.

Classical extreme value theory for stationary sequences of random variables can to a large extent be paraphrased as the study of exceedances over a high threshold. A special role within the description of the temporal dependence between such exceedances is played by the extremal index. Parts of this theory can be generalized not only to random variables on an arbitrary state space hitting certain failure sets, but even to a triangular array of rare events on an abstract probability space. In the case of M4 (maxima of multivariate moving maxima) processes, the arguments take a simple and direct form.

Let {X(s, t), s = (s1, s2) ∈ ℝ2, t ∈ ℝ} be a stationary random field defined over a discrete lattice. In this paper, we consider a set of domain of attraction criteria giving the notion of extremal index for random fields. Together with the extremal-types theorem given by Leadbetter and Rootzen (1997), this will give a characterization of the limiting distribution of the maximum of such random fields.

For arbitrary stationary sequences of random variables satisfying a mild mixing condition, distributional approximations are established for functionals of clusters of exceedances over a high threshold. The approximations are in terms of the distribution of the process conditionally on the event that the first variable exceeds the threshold. This conditional distribution is shown to converge to a nontrivial limit if the finite-dimensional distributions of the process are in the domain of attraction of a multivariate extreme-value distribution. In this case, therefore, limit distributions are obtained for functionals of clusters of extremes, thereby generalizing results for higher-order stationary Markov chains by Yun (2000).

We extend some results of the extreme-value theory of stationary random sequences to non-stationary random sequences. The extremal index, defined in the stationary case, plays a similar role in the extended case. The details show that this index describes not only the behaviour of exceedances above a high level but also above a non-constant high boundary.