We apply the concept of distance covariance for testing independence of two long-range dependent time series. As test statistic we propose a linear combination of empirical distance cross-covariances. We derive the asymptotic distribution of the test statistic, and we show consistency against a very general class of alternatives. The asymptotic theory developed in this paper is based on a novel non-central limit theorem for stochastic processes with values in an $L^2$-Hilbert space. This limit theorem is of general theoretical interest which goes beyond the context of this article. Subject to the dependence in the data, the standardization and the limit distributions of the proposed test statistic vary. Since the limit distributions are unknown, we propose a subsampling procedure to determine the critical values for the proposed test, and we provide a proof for the validity of subsampling. In a simulation study, we investigate the finite-sample behavior of our test, and we compare its performance to tests based on the empirical cross-covariances. As an application of our results we analyze the cross-dependencies between mean monthly discharges of three rivers.
We propose generalized portmanteau-type test statistics in the frequency domain to test independence between two stationary time series. The test statistics are formed analogous to the one in Chen and Deo (2004, Econometric Theory 20, 382-416), who extended the applicability of portmanteau goodness-of-fit test to the long memory case. Under the null hypothesis of independence, the asymptotic standard normal distributions of the proposed statistics are derived under fairly mild conditions. In particular, each time series is allowed to possess short memory, long memory or anti-persistence. A sim…
Frequently econometricians are interested in verifying a relationship between two or more time series. Such analysis is typically carried out by causality and/or independence tests which have been well studied when the data is univariate or multivariate. Modern data though is increasingly of a high dimensional or functional nature for which finite dimensional methods are not suitable. In the present paper we develop methodology to check the assumption that data obtained from two functional time series are independent. Our procedure is based on the norms of empirical cross covariance operators …
For testing hypothesis on the covariance operator of functional time series, we suggest to use the full functional information and to avoid dimension reduction techniques. The limit distribution follows from the central limit theorem of the weak convergence of the partial sum process in general Hilbert space applied to the product space. In order to obtain critical values for tests, we generalize bootstrap results from the independent to the dependent case. This results can be applied to covariance operators, autocovariance operators and cross covariance operators. We discuss one sample and ch…
We consider a stationary spatio-temporal random process and assume that we have a sample. By defining a sequence of discrete Fourier transforms at canonical frequencies at each location, and using these complex valued random varables as observed sample, we obtain expressions for the spatio-temporal covariance functions and the spectral density functions of the spatio-temporal random processes. These spectra correspond to non separable class of random processes. The spatio-temporal covariance functions, obtained here are functions of the spatial distance and the temporal frequency and are simil…
In this paper we propose statistical inference tools for the covariance operators of functional time series in the two sample and change point problem. In contrast to most of the literature the focus of our approach is not testing the null hypothesis of exact equality of the covariance operators. Instead we propose to formulate the null hypotheses in them form that "the distance between the operators is small", where we measure deviations by the sup-norm. We provide powerful bootstrap tests for these type of hypotheses, investigate their asymptotic properties and study their finite sample prop…
We obtain a sharp convergence rate for banded covariance matrix estimates of stationary processes. A precise order of magnitude is derived for spectral radius of sample covariance matrices. We also consider a thresholded covariance matrix estimator that can better characterize sparsity if the true covariance matrix is sparse. As our main tool, we implement Toeplitz [Math. Ann. 70 (1911) 351-376] idea and relate eigenvalues of covariance matrices to the spectral densities or Fourier transforms of the covariances. We develop a large deviation result for quadratic forms of stationary processes us…
We consider strictly stationary heavy tailed time series whose finite-dimensional exponent measures are concentrated on axes, and hence their extremal properties cannot be tackled using classical multivariate regular variation that is suitable for time series with extremal dependence. We recover relevant information about limiting behavior of time series with extremal independence by introducing a sequence of scaling functions and conditional scaling exponent. Both quantities provide more information about joint extremes than a widely used tail dependence coefficient. We calculate the scaling …
For multivariate stationary time series many important properties, such as partial correlation, graphical models and autoregressive representations are encoded in the inverse of its spectral density matrix. This is not true for nonstationary time series, where the pertinent information lies in the inverse infinite dimensional covariance matrix operator associated with the multivariate time series. This necessitates the study of the covariance of a multivariate nonstationary time series and its relationship to its inverse. We show that if the rows/columns of the infinite dimensional covariance …
Simultaneous Inference for Covariance and Precision Matrices of Long-Range Dependent Time Series
Booth School of Business, The University of Chicago（芝加哥大学布斯商学院）；Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California（南加州大学马歇尔商学院）；Department of Statistics and Data Science, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学统计与数据科学系）；Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago（芝加哥大学统计学系）
In many statistical modeling frameworks, goodness-of-fit tests are typically administered to the estimated residuals. In the time series setting, whiteness of the residuals is assessed using the sample autocorrelation function. For many time series models, especially those used for financial time series, the key assumption on the residuals is that they are in fact independent and not just uncorrelated. In this paper, we apply the auto-distance covariance function (ADCV) to evaluate the serial dependence of the estimated residuals. Distance covariance can discriminate between dependence and ind…
This is a survey of some recent results on the rational circulant covariance extension problem: Given a partial sequence $(c_0,c_1,\dots,c_n)$ of covariance lags $c_k=\mathbb{E}\{y(t+k)\overline{y(t)}\}$ emanating from a stationary periodic process $\{y(t)\}$ with period $2N>2n$, find all possible rational spectral functions of $\{y(t)\}$ of degree at most $2n$ or, equivalently, all bilateral and unilateral ARMA models of order at most $n$, having this partial covariance sequence. Each representation is obtained as the solution of a pair of dual convex optimization problems. This theory is the…
In this paper, we introduce an asymptotic test procedure to assess the stability of volatilities and cross-volatilites of linear and nonlinear multivariate time series models. The test is very flexible as it can be applied, for example, to many of the multivariate GARCH models established in the literature, and also works well in the case of high dimensionality of the underlying data. Since it is nonparametric, the procedure avoids the difficulties associated with parametric model selection, model fitting and parameter estimation. We provide the theoretical foundation for the test and demonstr…
We propose an independence test for random variables valued into metric spaces by using a test statistic obtained from appropriately centering and rescaling the squared Hilbert-Schmidt norm of the usual empirical estimator of normalized cross-covariance operator. We then get asymptotic normality of this statistic under independence hypothesis, so leading to a new test for independence of functional random variables. A simulation study that allows to compare the proposed test to existing ones is provided.
Investigation of the reversibility of the directional hierarchy in the interdependency among the notions of conditional independence, conditional mean independence, and zero conditional covariance, for two random variables X and Y given a conditioning element Z which is not constrained by any topological restriction on its range, reveals that if the first moments of X, Y, and XY exist, then conditional independence implies conditional mean independence and conditional mean independence implies zero conditional covariance, but the direction of the hierarchy is not reversible in general. If the …
This paper studies methods for testing and estimating change-points in the covariance structure of a high-dimensional linear time series. The assumed framework allows for a large class of multivariate linear processes (including vector autoregressive moving average (VARMA) models) of growing dimension and spiked covariance models. The approach uses bilinear forms of the centered or non-centered sample variance-covariance matrix. Change-point testing and estimation are based on maximally selected weighted cumulated sum (CUSUM) statistics. Large sample approximations under a change-point regime …
In arenas of application including environmental science, economics, and medicine, it is increasingly common to consider time series of curves or functions. Many inferential procedures employed in the analysis of such data involve the long run covariance function or operator, which is analogous to the long run covariance matrix familiar to finite dimensional time series analysis and econometrics. This function may be naturally estimated using a smoothed periodogram type estimator evaluated at frequency zero that relies crucially on the choice of a bandwidth parameter. Motivated by a number of …
We describe a family of conservative statistical tests for independence of two autocorrelated time series. The series may take values in any sets, and one of them must be stationary. A user-specified function quantifying the association of a segment of the two series is compared to an ensemble obtained by time-shifting the stationary series -N to N steps. If the series are independent, the unshifted value is in the top m shifted values with probability at most m/(N+1). For large N, the probability approaches m/(2N+1). A conservative test rejects independence at significance α if the unshifted …
Distributional approximations of (bi--) linear functions of sample variance-covariance matrices play a critical role to analyze vector time series, as they are needed for various purposes, especially to draw inference on the dependence structure in terms of second moments and to analyze projections onto lower dimensional spaces as those generated by principal components. This particularly applies to the high-dimensional case, where the dimension $d$ is allowed to grow with the sample size $n$ and may even be larger than $n$. We establish large-sample approximations for such bilinear forms rela…
This paper proposes some novel one-sided omnibus tests for independence between two multivariate stationary time series. These new tests apply the Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion (HSIC) to test the independence between the innovations of both time series. Under regular conditions, the limiting null distributions of our HSIC-based tests are established. Next, our HSIC-based tests are shown to be consistent. Moreover, a residual bootstrap method is used to obtain the critical values for our HSIC-based tests, and its validity is justified. Compared with the existing cross-correlation-based…
We consider general high-dimensional spiked sample covariance models and show that their leading sample spiked eigenvalues and their linear spectral statistics are asymptotically independent when the sample size and dimension are proportional to each other. As a byproduct, we also establish the central limit theorem of the leading sample spiked eigenvalues by removing the block diagonal assumption on the population covariance matrix, which is commonly needed in the literature. Moreover, we propose consistent estimators of the $L_4$ norm of the spiked population eigenvectors. Based on these res…
Analyzing multivariate time series data is important to predict future events and changes of complex systems in finance, manufacturing, and administrative decisions. The expressiveness power of Gaussian Process (GP) regression methods has been significantly improved by compositional covariance structures. In this paper, we present a new GP model which naturally handles multiple time series by placing an Indian Buffet Process (IBP) prior on the presence of shared kernels. Our selective covariance structure decomposition allows exploiting shared parameters over a set of multiple, selected time s…
The asymptotic behaviour of Linear Spectral Statistics (LSS) of the smoothed periodogram estimator of the spectral coherency matrix of a complex Gaussian high-dimensional time series $(\y_n)_{n \in \mathbb{Z}}$ with independent components is studied under the asymptotic regime where the sample size $N$ converges towards $+\infty$ while the dimension $M$ of $\y$ and the smoothing span of the estimator grow to infinity at the same rate in such a way that $\frac{M}{N} \rightarrow 0$. It is established that, at each frequency, the estimated spectral coherency matrix is close from the sample covari…
We propose a method for inferring the conditional independence graph (CIG) of a high-dimensional Gaussian vector time series (discrete-time process) from a finite-length observation. By contrast to existing approaches, we do not rely on a parametric process model (such as, e.g., an autoregressive model) for the observed random process. Instead, we only require certain smoothness properties (in the Fourier domain) of the process. The proposed inference scheme works even for sample sizes much smaller than the number of scalar process components if the true underlying CIG is sufficiently sparse. …
Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）；BI Norwegian Business School（BI挪威商学院）；Norwegian Seismic Array（挪威地震台阵）
One of the latest self-supervised learning (SSL) methods, VICReg, showed a great performance both in the linear evaluation and the fine-tuning evaluation. However, VICReg is proposed in computer vision and it learns by pulling representations of random crops of an image while maintaining the representation space by the variance and covariance loss. However, VICReg would be ineffective on non-stationary time series where different parts/crops of input should be differently encoded to consider the non-stationarity. Another recent SSL proposal, Temporal Neighborhood Coding (TNC) is effective for …
The accurate prediction of time-changing covariances is an important problem in the modeling of multivariate financial data. However, some of the most popular models suffer from a) overfitting problems and multiple local optima, b) failure to capture shifts in market conditions and c) large computational costs. To address these problems we introduce a novel dynamic model for time-changing covariances. Over-fitting and local optima are avoided by following a Bayesian approach instead of computing point estimates. Changes in market conditions are captured by assuming a diffusion process in param…
The aim of this thesis is to find a solution to the non-parametric independence problem in separable metric spaces. Suppose we are given finite collection of samples from an i.i.d. sequence of paired random elements, where each marginal has values in some separable metric space. The non-parametric independence problem raises the question on how one can use these samples to reasonably draw inference on whether the marginal random elements are independent or not. We will try to answer this question by utilizing the so-called distance covariance functional in metric spaces developed by Russell Ly…
The concept of distance covariance/correlation was introduced recently to characterize dependence among vectors of random variables. We review some statistical aspects of distance covariance/correlation function and we demonstrate its applicability to time series analysis. We will see that the auto-distance covariance/correlation function is able to identify nonlinear relationships and can be employed for testing the i.i.d.\ hypothesis. Comparisons with other measures of dependence are included.
Count data appears in various disciplines. In this work, a new method to analyze time series count data has been proposed. The method assumes exponentially decaying covariance structure, a special class of the Matérn covariance function, for the latent variable in a Poisson regression model. It is implemented in a Bayesian framework, with the help of Gibbs sampling and ARMS sampling techniques. The proposed approach provides reliable estimates for the covariate effects and estimates the extent of variability explained by the temporally dependent process and the white noise process. The method …
It is a common saying that testing for conditional independence, i.e., testing whether whether two random vectors $X$ and $Y$ are independent, given $Z$, is a hard statistical problem if $Z$ is a continuous random variable (or vector). In this paper, we prove that conditional independence is indeed a particularly difficult hypothesis to test for. Valid statistical tests are required to have a size that is smaller than a predefined significance level, and different tests usually have power against a different class of alternatives. We prove that a valid test for conditional independence does no…
The independence clustering problem is considered in the following formulation: given a set $S$ of random variables, it is required to find the finest partitioning $\{U_1,\dots,U_k\}$ of $S$ into clusters such that the clusters $U_1,\dots,U_k$ are mutually independent. Since mutual independence is the target, pairwise similarity measurements are of no use, and thus traditional clustering algorithms are inapplicable. The distribution of the random variables in $S$ is, in general, unknown, but a sample is available. Thus, the problem is cast in terms of time series. Two forms of sampling are con…
Testing for Serial Independence via Auto Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion
Department of Statistics and Data Science, School of Economics, Xiamen University（厦门大学经济学院统计与数据科学系）；Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Toronto（多伦多大学统计科学系）
We study an independence test based on distance correlation for random fields $(X,Y)$. We consider the situations when $(X,Y)$ is observed on a lattice with equidistant grid sizes and when $(X,Y)$ is observed at random locations. We provide asymptotic theory for the sample distance correlation in both situations and show bootstrap consistency. The latter fact allows one to build a test for independence of $X$ and $Y$ based on the considered discretizations of these fields. We illustrate the performance of the bootstrap test in a simulation study involving fractional Brownian and infinite varia…
A joint limit theorem for the point process of the off-diagonal entries of a sample covariance matrix $\mathbf{S}$, constructed from $n$ observations of a $p$-dimensional random vector with iid components, and the Frobenius norm of $\mathbf{S}$ is proved. In particular, assuming that $p$ and $n$ tend to infinity we obtain a central limit theorem for the Frobenius norm in the case of finite fourth moment of the components and an infinite variance stable law in the case of infinite fourth moment. Extending a theorem of Kallenberg, we establish asymptotic independence of the point process and the…
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data provides information concerning activity in the brain and in particular the interactions between brain regions. Resting state fMRI data is widely used for inferring connectivities in the brain which are not due to external factors. As such analyzes strongly rely on stationarity, change point procedures can be applied in order to detect possible deviations from this crucial assumption. In this paper, we model fMRI data as functional time series and develop tools for the detection of deviations from covariance stationarity via change point altern…
Fitting high-dimensional data involves a delicate tradeoff between faithful representation and the use of sparse models. Too often, sparsity assumptions on the fitted model are too restrictive to provide a faithful representation of the observed data. In this paper, we present a novel framework incorporating sparsity in different domains.We decompose the observed covariance matrix into a sparse Gaussian Markov model (with a sparse precision matrix) and a sparse independence model (with a sparse covariance matrix). Our framework incorporates sparse covariance and sparse precision estimation as …
Bootstrap methods for estimating the long-run covariance of stationary functional time series are considered. We introduce a versatile bootstrap method that relies on functional principal component analysis, where principal component scores can be bootstrapped by maximum entropy. Two other bootstrap methods resample error functions, after the dependence structure being modeled linearly by a sieve method or nonlinearly by a functional kernel regression. Through a series of Monte-Carlo simulation, we evaluate and compare the finite-sample performances of these three bootstrap methods for estimat…
For a multivariate normal distribution, the sparsity of the covariance and precision matrices encodes complete information about independence and conditional independence properties. For general distributions, the covariance and precision matrices reveal correlations and so-called partial correlations between variables, but these do not, in general, have any correspondence with respect to independence properties. In this paper, we prove that, for a certain class of non-Gaussian distributions, these correspondences still hold, exactly for the covariance and approximately for the precision. The …
Given an iid sequence of pairs of stochastic processes on the unit interval we construct a measure of independence for the components of the pairs. We define distance covariance and distance correlation based on approximations of the component processes at finitely many discretization points. Assuming that the mesh of the discretization converges to zero as a suitable function of the sample size, we show that the sample distance covariance and correlation converge to limits which are zero if and only if the component processes are independent. To construct a test for independence of the discre…
Distance covariance is a quantity to measure the dependence of two random vectors. We show that the original concept introduced and developed by Székely, Rizzo and Bakirov can be embedded into a more general framework based on symmetric Lévy measures and the corresponding real-valued continuous negative definite functions. The Lévy measures replace the weight functions used in the original definition of distance covariance. All essential properties of distance covariance are preserved in this new framework. From a practical point of view this allows less restrictive moment conditions on the un…
Current understanding holds that financial contagion is driven mainly by the system-wide interconnectedness of institutions. A distinction has been made between systematic and idiosyncratic channels of contagion, with shocks transmitted through the latter expected to be substantially more likely to lead to systemic crisis than through the former. Idiosyncratic connectivity is thought to be driven not simply by obviously shared characteristics among institutions, but more by latent characteristics that lead to the holding of related securities. We develop a graphical model for multivariate fina…
The most popular ways to test for independence of two ordinal random variables are by means of Kendall's tau and Spearman's rho. However, such tests are not consistent, only having power for alternatives with ``monotonic'' association. In this paper, we introduce a natural extension of Kendall's tau, called $τ^*$, which is non-negative and zero if and only if independence holds, thus leading to a consistent independence test. Furthermore, normalization gives a rank correlation which can be used as a measure of dependence, taking values between zero and one. A comparison with alternative measur…
The distance covariance of two random vectors is a measure of their dependence. The empirical distance covariance and correlation can be used as statistical tools for testing whether two random vectors are independent. We propose an analogs of the distance covariance for two stochastic processes defined on some interval. Their empirical analogs can be used to test the independence of two processes.
We consider stationary time series $\{X_j, j \in Z\} whose finite dimensional distributions are regularly varying with extremal independence. We assume that for each $h \geq 1$, conditionally on $X_0$ to exceed a threshold tending to infinity, the conditional distribution of $X_h$ suitably normalized converges weakly to a non degenerate distribution. We consider in this paper the estimation of the normalization and of the limiting distribution.
In graphical modelling, a bi-directed graph encodes marginal independences among random variables that are identified with the vertices of the graph. We show how to transform a bi-directed graph into a maximal ancestral graph that (i) represents the same independence structure as the original bi-directed graph, and (ii) minimizes the number of arrowheads among all ancestral graphs satisfying (i). Here the number of arrowheads of an ancestral graph is the number of directed edges plus twice the number of bi-directed edges. In Gaussian models, this construction can be used for more efficient ite…
This paper investigates the problem of testing independence of two random vectors of general dimensions. For this, we give for the first time a distribution-free consistent test. Our approach combines distance covariance with the center-outward ranks and signs developed in Hallin (2017). In technical terms, the proposed test is consistent and distribution-free in the family of multivariate distributions with nonvanishing (Lebesgue) probability densities. Exploiting the (degenerate) U-statistic structure of the distance covariance and the combinatorial nature of Hallin's center-outward ranks an…
