Weak signals and heavy tails: learning theory meets extreme value analysis

Abstract The masses of data now available have opened up the prospect of discovering weak signals using machine-learning algorithms, with a view to predictive or interpretation tasks. As this survey of recent results attempts to show, bringing multivariate extreme value theory and statistical learning theory together in a common, nonparametric and nonasymptotic framework makes it possible to design and analyze new methods for exploiting the scarce information located in distribution tails in these purposes. This article reviews recently proved theoretical tools for establishing guarantees for supervised or unsupervised algorithms learning from a fraction of extreme data. These are mainly exponential maximal deviation inequalities tailored to low-probability regions and concentration results for stochastic processes empirically describing the behavior of multivariate extreme observations, their dependence structure in particular. Under appropriate assumptions of regular variation, several illustrative applications in multivariate settings are then examined: classification, regression, anomaly detection, model selection via cross-validation. For these, generalization results are established inspired by the classical bounds in statistical learning theory. In the same spirit, it is also shown how to adapt the popular high-dimensional Lasso technique in the context of extreme values for the covariates with generalization guarantees.