High-dimensional interpolation is common in modern machine learning, but its tail risk is less understood than its expected prediction risk. Existing theory shows that interpolating models can perform well in expectation, yet such guarantees do not determine the probability of rare, severe errors. In operations research and stochastic decision-making applications, rare estimation errors can have disproportionate downstream effects, so tail behavior matters alongside average performance. We study the fragility of high-dimensional linear interpolators using large-deviation methods. We focus on ridgeless regression and compare it with ridge-regularized estimators. We first show that the risk of ridgeless regression can exhibit heavy-tailed behavior: although its expected risk may remain well controlled, its upper tail can decay much more slowly than that of regularized alternatives. We then quantify this phenomenon at the level of large-deviation rates. In the regime we study, ridge regularization suppresses fixed right-tail deviations at the $n^2$ scale, whereas ridgeless regression has only $n\log n$-scale decay, where $n$ is the sample size. This gap shows that interpolation can be statistically fragile even when it is accurate on average. Thus regularization affects the frequency of rare, high-impact risk events in addition to the usual bias-variance tradeoff.
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) preserves variance, not the information needed to detect rare catastrophic events. This paper proves the existence of a {\it Risk Shadow}: PCA can retain over 99.9999 percent of total variance while completely erasing all signal about rare, high-impact failures. When this happens, even the best possible classifier operating on the PCA representation reduces to a constant predictor. The root cause is a fundamental mismatch between variance maximization and tail risk awareness. To break the shadow, we introduce Expectile PCA (ExPCA) and Tail-Preserving PCA (TP-PCA), two methods that reweight the data covariance toward high-impact events. We prove theoretically that ExPCA strictly outperforms PCA in retaining rare-event information, and we validate our claims on synthetic data and a real-world credit card fraud detection benchmark. Our results call for a fundamental rethinking of variance-based dimensionality reduction in high-stakes decisions.
Standard approaches to forecasting the weekly number of earthquakes on a spatial grid rely on the Poisson distribution with a single global dispersion assumption. We show that this assumption is systematically violated in seismic data from Central Asia (2010-2024), where a likelihood-ratio test with boundary correction strongly rejects the Poisson hypothesis (p < 10^{-179}). The main contribution of this work is the EarthquakeNet architecture, which provides an endogenous per-cell estimate of the overdispersion parameter alpha via a neural network (spatial embeddings + MLP), without explicit spatial covariance specification. In contrast to existing negative binomial regression approaches in seismological forecasting, which typically assume a single global alpha, the proposed per-cell formulation allows the model to identify spatial heterogeneity in seismic clustering and to construct probabilistic risk-aware alerts via quantiles of the predicted distribution. A walk-forward evaluation (2018-2023) over four systems shows an 8.6 percent reduction in mean pinball deviation (MPD) relative to a negative binomial GLM baseline. The strongest improvements are observed in the tail regime (Y >= 5), where the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) of the proposed model is 12.5 percent lower than that of the baseline, indicating improved calibration in extreme-event forecasting.