The study of multivariate extremes is dominated by multivariate regular variation, although it is well known that this approach does not provide adequate distinction between random vectors whose components are not always simultaneously large. Various alternative dependence measures and representations have been proposed, with the most well-known being hidden regular variation and the conditional extreme value model. These varying depictions of extremal dependence arise through consideration of different parts of the multivariate domain, and particularly through exploring what happens when extremes of one variable may grow at different rates from other variables. Thus far, these alternative representations have come from distinct sources, and links between them are limited. In this work we elucidate many of the relevant connections through a geometrical approach. In particular, the shape of the limit set of scaled sample clouds in light-tailed margins is shown to provide a description of several different extremal dependence representations.

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.