Estimation of Parameters of the Generalized Pareto Distribution by the Least Squares

Traditional estimations of parameters of the generalized Pareto distribution (GPD) are generally constrained by the shape parameter of GPD. Such as: the method-of-moments (MOM), the probability-weighted moments (PWM), L-moments (LM), the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and so on. In this paper we use the fact that GPD can be transformed into the exponential distribution and use the results of parameters estimation for the exponential distribution, than we propose parameters estimators of the two-parameter or three-parameter GPD by the least squares method. Some asymptotic results are provided and the proposed method not constrained by the shape parameter of GPD. A simulation study is carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed method and to compare them with other methods suggested in this paper. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method performs better than others in some common situation.