Analysis of the autocorrelation function for time series with higher-order temporal correlations: An exponential case

Abstract

Temporal correlations in the time series observed in various systems have been characterized by the autocorrelation function. Such correlations can be explained by heavy-tailed interevent time distributions as well as by correlations between interevent times. The latter is called higher-order temporal correlations, and they have been captured by the notion of bursts; a burst indicates a set of consecutive events that rapidly occur within a short time period and are separated from other bursts by long time intervals. The number of events in the burst is called a burst size. Some empirical analyses have shown that consecutive burst sizes are correlated with each other. To study the impact of such correlations on the autocorrelation function, we devise a model generating a time series with higher-order temporal correlations by employing the copula method. We successfully derive the analytical solution of the autocorrelation function of the model time series for arbitrary distributions of interevent times and burst sizes when consecutive burst sizes are correlated. For the demonstration of our analysis, we adopt exponential distributions of interevent times and burst sizes to understand how the correlations between consecutive burst sizes affect the decaying behavior of the autocorrelation function.