Goodness-of-fit tests for archimedean copulas in high dimensions

Abstract

A goodness-of-fit transformation for Archimedean copulas is presented from which a test can be derived. In a large-scale simulation study it is shown that the test performs well according to the error probability of the first kind and the power under several alternatives, especially in high dimensions where this test is (still) easy to apply. The test is compared to commonly applied tests for Archimedean copulas. However, these are usually numerically demanding (according to precision and runtime), especially when the dimension is large. The transformation underlying the newly proposed test was originally used for sampling random variates from Archimedean copulas. Its correctness is proven under weaker assumptions. It may be interpreted as an analogon to Rosenblatt’s transformation which is linked to the conditional distribution method for sampling random variates. Furthermore, the suggested goodness-of-fit test complements a commonly used goodness-of-fit test based on the Kendall distribution function in the sense that it utilizes all other components of the transformation except the Kendall distribution function. Finally, a graphical test based on the proposed transformation is presented.