Empirical likelihood based testing for multivariate regular variation

Multivariate regular variation is a common assumption in the statistics literature and needs to be verified in real-data applications. We develop a novel hypothesis test for multivariate regular variation, employing localized empirical likelihood. We establish the weak convergence of the test statistic to a nonstandard, distribution-free limit and hence can provide universal critical values for the test. We show the very good finite-sample behavior of the procedure through simulations and apply the test to several real-data examples.