Application of copulas to multivariate control charts

The most popular multivariate control chart for monitoring the mean of a distribution is probably the Hotelling T² rule. Unfortunately, this rule relies on the assumption that the distribution under control is Gaussian, which is rarely true in practice. The objective of this paper is to propose a new approach for the non-normal multivariate case. It consists in the construction of a tolerance region obtained from a density level set estimation. The method follows a “plug-in” approach in which the density of the observations is previously estimated. This estimation is conducted using copulas modeling, an increasingly popular tool in multivariate modeling.