Speed of convergence for laws of rare events and escape rates

Abstract

We obtain error terms on the rate of convergence to Extreme Value Laws for a general class of weakly dependent stochastic processes. The dependence of the error terms on the `time' and `length' scales is very explicit. Specialising to data derived from a class of dynamical systems we find even more detailed error terms, one application of which is to consider escape rates through small holes in these systems.