Taming Black Swans: Long-tailed distributions in the natural and engineered world

Long-tailed distributions are common in natural and engineered systems; as a result, we encounter extreme values more often than we would expect from a short-tailed distribution. If we are not prepared for these 'black swans', they can be disastrous.\n\nBut we have statistical tools for identifying long-tailed distributions, estimating their parameters, and making better predictions about rare events.\n\nIn this talk, I present evidence of long-tailed distributions in a variety of datasets -- including earthquakes, asteroids, and stock market crashes -- discuss statistical methods for dealing with them, and show implementations using scientific Python libraries.