Estimators of the extreme-value index are based on a set of upper order statistics. We present an adaptivemethod to choose the number of order statistics involved in an optimal way, balancing variance and biascomponents. Recently this has been achieved for the similar but somewhat less involved...

Motivated by prediction problems for time series with heavy-tailed marginal distributions, we consider methods based on 'local least absolute deviations' for estimating a regression median from dependent data. Unlike more conventional 'local median' methods, which are in effect based on locally...