A proper scoring rule for minimum information bivariate copulas

Two-dimensional distributions whose marginal distributions are uniform are called bivariate copulas. Among them, the one that satisfies given constraints on expectation and is closest to being an independent distribution in the sense of Kullback–Leibler divergence is called the minimum information bivariate copula. The density function of the minimum information copula contains a set of functions called the normalizing functions, which are often difficult to compute. Although a number of proper scoring rules for probability distributions having normalizing constants such as exponential families have been proposed, these scores are not applicable to the minimum information copulas due to the normalizing functions. In this paper, we propose the conditional Kullback–Leibler score, which avoids computation of the normalizing functions. The main idea of its construction is to use pairs of observations. We show that the proposed score is strictly proper in the space of copula density functions and therefore the estimator derived from it has asymptotic consistency. Furthermore, the score is convex with respect to the parameters and can be easily optimized by the gradient methods.