1 Introduction

Copulae are commonly referred to as functions that join or couple multivariate distribution functions to their one-dimensional marginal distribution functions; a formal definition of copula functions is introduced in Chapter 2.

This short bookdown book covers basic principles of copulae, Archimedean copulae, and estimation methods (focussing on full maximum likelihood estimation). Throughout this document I will focus on bivariate copulae (i.e. for bivariate outcomes), but most (if not all) of the theory outlined here generalises to any number of dimensions.