Conditionalization of Copula-Based Models

Copula models are becoming increasingly popular in engineering and financial applications. They provide a flexible way of constructing joint distributions with arbitrary one-dimensional margins and a wide variety of dependence structures. This paper studies different types of conditionalization of copula-based models. We conditionalize these models in the usual way on point values but also propose a different type of conditionalization on a new margin. This new type of conditionalization is motivated by experience with a model built for application in modeling risk in civil aviation. Changing one margin in a copula model is very easy; however, it is not equivalent to conditionalizing on a new margin. For this purpose, the technique presented by Holland and Wang [Holland PW, Wang YJ (1987) Dependence function for continuous bivariate densities. Commun. Statist. Theory Methods 16(3):867–876], called marginal replacement, is used. The main result of this paper allows a simplified way of conditionalizing on more than one univariate margin in a normal copula model.