EV-GAN: Simulation of extreme events with ReLU neural networks

Feedforward neural networks based on Rectified linear units (ReLU) cannot efficiently approximate quantile functions which are not bounded, especially in the case of heavy-tailed distributions. We thus propose a new parametrization for the generator of a Generative adversarial network (GAN) adapted to this framework, basing on extreme-value theory. An analysis of the uniform error between the extreme quantile and its GAN approximation is provided: We establish that the rate of convergence of the error is mainly driven by the second-order parameter of the data distribution. The above results are illustrated on simulated data and real financial data. It appears that our approach outperforms the classical GAN in a wide range of situations including high-dimensional and dependent data.