A desirable property of an autocovariance estimator is to be robust to the presence of additive outliers. It is well-known that the sample autocovariance, being based on moments, does not have this property. Hence, the use of an autocovariance estimator which is robust to additive outliers can be very useful for time-series modeling. In this paper, the asymptotic properties of the robust scale and autocovariance estimators proposed by Rousseeuw and Croux (1993) and Genton and Ma (2000) are established for Gaussian processes, with either short-range or long-range dependence. It is shown in the short-range dependence setting that this robust estimator is asymptotically normal at the rate $\sqrt{n}$, where $n$ is the number of observations. An explicit expression of the asymptotic variance is also given and compared to the asymptotic variance of the classical autocovariance estimator. In the long-range dependence setting, the limiting distribution displays the same behavior than that of the classical autocovariance estimator, with a Gaussian limit and rate $\sqrt{n}$ when the Hurst parameter $H$ is less 3/4 and with a non-Gaussian limit (belonging to the second Wiener chaos) with rate depending on the Hurst parameter when $H \in (3/4,1)$. Some Monte-Carlo experiments are presented to illustrate our claims and the Nile River data is analyzed as an application. The theoretical results and the empirical evidence strongly suggest using the robust estimators as an alternative to estimate the dependence structure of Gaussian processes.
Consider the empirical autocovariance matrix at a given non-zero time lag based on observations from a multivariate complex Gaussian stationary time series. The spectral analysis of these autocovariance matrices can be useful in certain statistical problems, such as those related to testing for white noise. We study the behavior of their spectral measures in the asymptotic regime where the time series dimension and the observation window length both grow to infinity, and at the same rate. Following a general framework in the field of the spectral analysis of large random non-Hermitian matrices…
A semi-analytic method is proposed for the generation of realizations of a multivariate process of a given linear correlation structure and marginal distribution. This is an extension of a similar method for univariate processes, transforming the autocorrelation of the non-Gaussian process to that of a Gaussian process based on a piece-wise linear marginal transform from non-Gaussian to Gaussian marginal. The extension to multivariate processes involves the derivation of the autocorrelation matrix from the marginal transforms, which determines the generating vector autoregressive process. The …
The paper presents a systematic theory for asymptotic inference of autocovariances of stationary processes. We consider nonparametric tests for serial correlations based on the maximum (or ${\cal L}^\infty$) and the quadratic (or ${\cal L}^2$) deviations. For these two cases, with proper centering and rescaling, the asymptotic distributions of the deviations are Gumbel and Gaussian, respectively. To establish such an asymptotic theory, as byproducts, we develop a normal comparison principle and propose a sufficient condition for summability of joint cumulants of stationary processes. We adopt …
Gaussian processes that can be decomposed into a smooth mean function and a stationary autocorrelated noise process are considered and a fully automatic nonparametric method to simultaneous estimation of mean and auto-covariance functions of such processes is developed. Our empirical Bayes approach is data-driven, numerically efficient and allows for the construction of confidence sets for the mean function. Performance is demonstrated in simulations and real data analysis. The method is implemented in the R package eBsc that accompanies the paper.
We consider processes with second order long range dependence resulting from heavy tailed durations. We refer to this phenomenon as duration-driven long range dependence (DDLRD), as opposed to the more widely studied linear long range dependence based on fractional differencing of an $iid$ process. We consider in detail two specific processes having DDLRD, originally presented in Taqqu and Levy (1986), and Parke (1999). For these processes, we obtain the limiting distribution of suitably standardized discrete Fourier transforms (DFTs) and sample autocovariances. At low frequencies, the standar…
We consider the class of all stationary Gaussian process with explicit parametric spectral density. Under some conditions on the autocovariance function, we defined a GMM estimator that satisfies consistency and asymptotic normality, using the Breuer-Major theorem and previous results on ergodicity. This result is applied to the joint estimation of the three parameters of a stationary Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (fOU) process driven by a fractional Brownian motion. The asymptotic normality of its GMM estimator applies for any H in (0,1) and under some restrictions on the remaining parameters. A numeric…
Spatially referenced data often have autocovariance functions with elliptical isolevel contours, a property known as geometric anisotropy. The anisotropy parameters include the tilt of the ellipse (orientation angle) with respect to a reference axis and the aspect ratio of the principal correlation lengths. Since these parameters are unknown a priori, sample estimates are needed to define suitable spatial models for the interpolation of incomplete data. The distribution of the anisotropy statistics is determined by a non-Gaussian sampling joint probability density. By means of analytical calcu…
A special class of standard Gaussian Autoregressive Hilbertian processes of order one (Gaussian ARH(1) processes), with bounded linear autocorrelation operator, which does not satisfy the usual Hilbert-Schmidt assumption, is considered. To compensate the slow decay of the diagonal coefficients of the autocorrelation operator, a faster decay velocity of the eigenvalues of the trace autocovariance operator of the innovation process is assumed. As usual, the eigenvectors of the autocovariance operator of the ARH(1) process are considered for projection, since, here, they are assumed to be known. …
We study how the round-off (or discretization) error changes the statistical properties of a Gaussian long memory process. We show that the autocovariance and the spectral density of the discretized process are asymptotically rescaled by a factor smaller than one, and we compute exactly this scaling factor. Consequently, we find that the discretized process is also long memory with the same Hurst exponent as the original process. We consider the properties of two estimators of the Hurst exponent, namely the local Whittle (LW) estimator and the Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA). By using ana…
In this paper, we develop econometric tools to analyze the integrated volatility of the efficient price and the dynamic properties of microstructure noise in high-frequency data under general dependent noise. We first develop consistent estimators of the variance and autocovariances of noise using a variant of realized volatility. Next, we employ these estimators to adapt the pre-averaging method and derive a consistent estimator of the integrated volatility, which converges stably to a mixed Gaussian distribution at the optimal rate $n^{1/4}$. To refine the finite sample performance, we propo…
We consider a complex-valued linear mixture model, under discrete weakly stationary processes. We recover latent components of interest, which have undergone a linear mixing. We study asymptotic properties of a classical unmixing estimator, that is based on simultaneous diagonalization of the covariance matrix and an autocovariance matrix with lag $τ$. Our main contribution is that our asymptotic results can be applied to a large class of processes. In related literature, the processes are typically assumed to have weak correlations. We extend this class and consider the unmixing estimator und…
There are all kinds of weak dependence. For example, strong mixing. Short-range dependence (SRD) is also a form of weak dependence. It occurs in the context of processes that are subordinated to the Gaussian. Is a SRD process strong mixing if the underlying Gaussian process is long-range dependent? We show that this is not necessarily the case.
Moving from univariate to bivariate jointly dependent long-memory time series introduces a phase parameter $(γ)$, at the frequency of principal interest, zero; for short-memory series $γ=0$ automatically. The latter case has also been stressed under long memory, along with the ``fractional differencing'' case $γ=(δ_2-δ_1)π/2$, where $δ_1$, $δ_2$ are the memory parameters of the two series. We develop time domain conditions under which these are and are not relevant, and relate the consequent properties of cross-autocovariances to ones of the (possibly bilateral) moving average representation w…
Quantile- and copula-related spectral concepts recently have been considered by various authors. Those spectra, in their most general form, provide a full characterization of the copulas associated with the pairs $(X_t,X_{t-k})$ in a process $(X_t)_{t\in\mathbb{Z}}$, and account for important dynamic features, such as changes in the conditional shape (skewness, kurtosis), time-irreversibility, or dependence in the extremes that their traditional counterparts cannot capture. Despite various proposals for estimation strategies, only quite incomplete asymptotic distributional results are availabl…
The paper is devoted to three-parametric self-similar Gaussian Volterra processes that generalize fractional Brownian motion. We study the asymptotic growth of such processes and the properties of long- and short-range dependence. Then we consider the problem of the drift parameter estimation for Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process driven by Gaussian Volterra process under consideration. We construct a strongly consistent estimator and investigate its asymptotic properties. Namely, we prove that it has the Cauchy asymptotic distribution.
Confidence intervals based on penalized maximum likelihood estimators such as the LASSO, adaptive LASSO, and hard-thresholding are analyzed. In the known-variance case, the finite-sample coverage properties of such intervals are determined and it is shown that symmetric intervals are the shortest. The length of the shortest intervals based on the hard-thresholding estimator is larger than the length of the shortest interval based on the adaptive LASSO, which is larger than the length of the shortest interval based on the LASSO, which in turn is larger than the standard interval based on the ma…
In this paper, we study the nonparametric linear model, when the error process is a dependent Gaussian process. We focus on the estimation of the mean vector via a model selection approach. We first give the general theoretical form of the penalty function, ensuring that the penalized estimator among a collection of models satisfies an oracle inequality. Then we derive a penalty shape involving the spectral radius of the covariance matrix of the errors, which can be chosen proportional to the dimension when the error process is stationary and short range dependent. However, this penalty can be…
This short note is on a property of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence which indicates that independent Gaussian distributions minimize the KL divergence from given independent Gaussian distributions. The primary purpose of this note is for the referencing of papers that need to make use of this property entirely or partially.
