A new method for estimating the tail index using truncated sample sequence

Abstract

This article proposes a new method of truncated estimation to estimate the tail index $\alpha$ of the extremely heavy-tailed distribution with infinite mean or variance. We not only present two truncated estimators $\hat{\alpha}$ and $\hat{\alpha}^{\prime}$ for estimating $\alpha$ ($0<\alpha \leq 1$) and $\alpha$ ($1<\alpha \leq 2$) respectively, but also prove their asymptotic statistical properties. The numerical simulation results comparing the six known estimators in estimating error, the Type I Error and the power of estimator show that the performance of the two new truncated estimators is quite good on the whole.