Related papers: Quantifying the Unexpected: a scientific approach …
In this second part of our survey on the social and natural distributions, we investigate some models, which intend to explain the statistical regularity of the natural and social distributions. There is a large variety of models and in…
Extreme events can come either from point processes, when the size or energy of the events is above a certain threshold, or from time series, when the intensity of a signal surpasses a threshold value. We are particularly concerned by the…
Society's drive toward ever faster socio-technical systems, means that there is an urgent need to understand the threat from 'black swan' extreme events that might emerge. On 6 May 2010, it took just five minutes for a spontaneous mix of…
A leading goal for climate science and weather risk management is to accurately model both the physics and statistics of extreme events. These two goals are fundamentally at odds: the higher a computational model's resolution, the more…
Extreme value statistics, or extreme statistics for short, refers to the statistics that characterizes rare events of either unusually high or low intensity: climate disasters like floods following extremely intense rains are among the…
In this article, it is shown specifically that natural system chance events as represented by theory predicted (a priori) probabilistic statements used in such realms as modern particle physics, among others, are only random relative to the…
It is part of our daily social-media experience that seemingly ordinary items (videos, news, publications, etc.) unexpectedly gain an enormous amount of attention. Here we investigate how unexpected these events are. We propose a method…
A central problem in uncertainty quantification is how to characterize the impact that our incomplete knowledge about models has on the predictions we make from them. This question naturally lends itself to a probabilistic formulation, by…
When the probability of measuring a particular value of some quantity varies inversely as a power of that value, the quantity is said to follow a power law, also known variously as Zipf's law or the Pareto distribution. Power laws appear…
Studying extreme events and how they evolve in a changing climate is one of the most important current scientific challenges. Starting from complex climate models, a key difficulty is to be able to run long enough simulations in order to…
The aim of this work is the quantification and prediction of rare events characterized by extreme intensity in nonlinear waves with broad spectra. We consider a one-dimensional non- linear model with deep-water waves dispersion relation,…
Extreme weather events have significant consequences, dominating the impact of climate on society. While high-resolution weather models can forecast many types of extreme events on synoptic timescales, long-term climatological risk…
We develop the concept of ``dragon-kings'' corresponding to meaningful outliers, which are found to coexist with power laws in the distributions of event sizes under a broad range of conditions in a large variety of systems. These…
Extreme Scattering Events are sometimes manifest in the light-curves of compact radio-quasars at frequencies of a few GHz. These events are not understood. The model which appears to offer the best explanation requires a new population of…
Astronomy has always been propelled by the discovery of new phenomena lacking precedent, often followed by new theories to explain their existence and properties. In the modern era of large surveys tiling the sky at ever high precision and…
Extreme events gain the attention of researchers due to their utmost importance in various contexts ranging from finance to climatology. This brings such recurrent events to the limelight of attention in interdisciplinary research. A…
At least one unusual event appears in some count datasets. It will lead to a more concentrated (or dispersed) distribution than the Poisson, the gamma, the Weibull, and the Conway-Maxwell-Poisson (CMP) can accommodate. These well-known…
We develop a simple test for deviations from power law tails, which is based on the asymptotic properties of the empirical distribution function. We use this test to answer the question whether great natural disasters, financial crashes or…
In classical physics the joint probability of a number of individually rare independent events is given by the Poisson distribution. It describes, for example, unidirectional transfer of population between the densely and sparsely populated…
Waves traveling through random media exhibit random focusing that leads to extremely high wave intensities even in the absence of nonlinearities. Although such extreme events are present in a wide variety of physical systems and the…