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This article assesses the distance between the laws of stochastic differential equations with multiplicative Lévy noise on path space in terms of their characteristics. The notion of transportation distance on the set of Lévy kernels introduced by Kosenkova and Kulik yields a natural and statistically tractable upper bound on the noise sensitivity. This extends recent results for the additive case in terms of coupling distances to the multiplicative case. The strength of this notion is shown in a statistical implementation for simulations and the example of a benchmark time series in paleoclimate.
Different upper tail indicators exist to characterize heavy tail phenomena, but no comparative study has been carried out so far. We evaluate the shape parameter (GEV), obesity index, Gini index and upper tail ratio (UTR) against a novel benchmark of tail heaviness - the surprise factor. Sensitivity analyses to sample size and changes in scale-to-location ratio are carried out in bootstrap experiments. The UTR replicates the surprise factor best but is most uncertain and only comparable between records of similar length. For samples with symmetric Lorenz curves, shape parameter, obesity and Gini indices provide consistent indications. For asymmetric Lorenz curves, however, the first two tend to overestimate, whereas Gini index tends to underestimate tail heaviness. We suggest the use of a combination of shape parameter, obesity and Gini index to characterize tail heaviness. These indicators should be supported with calculation of the Lorenz asymmetry coefficients and interpreted with caution.