Extreme events, by definition, cause much harm to people, property, and the natural world. Such events can result from the vagaries of nature (floods or earthquakes) or from technological failure or unintentional human error (Chernobyl or Bhopal). More recently we have witnessed another form of extreme hazard, resulting from terrorism. This paper examines the complex interplay between emotion a...

The more tests we perform on a set of data, the more likely we are to reject the null hypothesis when it is true (i.e., a “Type I” error). This is a consequence of the logic of hypothesis testing: We reject the null hypothesis if we witness a rare event. But the larger the number of tests, the easier it is to find rare events and therefore the easier it is to make the mistake of thinking that t...

Abstract This paper shows that one cannot learn the probability of rare events without imposing further structural assumptions. The event of interest is that of obtaining an outcome outside the coverage of an i.i.d. sample from a discrete distribution. The probability of this event is referred to as the “missing mass”. The impossibility result can then be stated as: the missing mass is not dist...

In response to an extreme event, individuals on social media demonstrate interesting behaviors in information seeking and sharing, depending on their backgrounds. Existing studies have attempted to analyze and understand the regularities of human responses during an extreme event, e.g., their spatiotemporal patterns. However, most of them focus on the general patterns of human collective online...

E very year, the Bulletin of the AMS publishes an annual report on the State of the Climate [e.g., see the Blunden and Arndt (2012) supplement to this issue]. That report does an excellent job of documenting global weather and climate conditions of the previous year and putting them into accurate historical perspective. But it does not address the causes. One of the reasons is that the scientis...

Considering a disastrous earthquake as a rare event, the aim of this study is to apply the proposed data construction method (DCM) to determine the possible distribution pattern of disastrous earthquakes in Taiwan. Owing to the availability of only a limited amount of data and based on the multiset division of DCM, virtual samples have been generated. The procedure is illustrated by a numerical...

We study the crowding of near-extreme events in the time gaps between successive finishers in major international marathons. Naively, one might expect these gaps to become progressively larger for better-placing finishers. While such an increase does indeed occur from the middle of the finishing pack down to approximately 20th place, the gaps saturate for the first 10–20 finishers. We give a pr...

The variability of the second order moments of flood peaks with respect to geomorphoclimatic basin characteristics was investigated. In particular, the behaviour of the coefficient of variation (Cv) of the series of annual maximum floods was analysed with respect to its dependence on physically consistent quantities. The results achieved were in fairly good agreement with real world observed ch...

Estimation of rare events probabilities (such as loss rate) in high speed network remains in most cases an open problem. To address this problem, a exible hardware testbed for simulation of ATM-based networks has been used. The goal of this article is to present this simulation technique. It is shown that this technique can be used to highlight rare events, such as realistic packet loss probabi...

Given a collection of seasonal time-series, how can we find regular (cyclic) patterns and outliers (i.e. rare events)? These two types of patterns are hidden and mixed in the time-varying activities. How can we robustly separate regular patterns and outliers, without requiring any prior information? We present CycloneM, a unifying model to capture both cyclic patterns and outliers, and CycloneF...