Spectral analysis of multivariate stationary Hawkes processes

Abstract

We establish the asymptotic validity of frequency-domain inference for stationary multivariate Hawkes processes under mild conditions, bridging the gap between theory and application. By developing upper-bounds on the reduced cumulant measures from the cluster representation of the Hawkes processes, we prove a functional central limit theorem and, as a consequence, consistency of the Whittle estimator under stationarity alone (i.e., the spectral radius of the interactions matrix $\rho(\boldsymbol\nu)<1$), applicable to Hawkes processes with heavy-tailed mutual-excitation kernels. Under mild extra moment conditions, we further obtain asymptotic normality with an explicit limiting covariance in terms of second- and fourth-order cumulant spectral densities. We also propose a simple frequency-domain method to detect joint independence of subprocesses of a multivariate Hawkes process. The performance of the Whittle estimator and the test of independence are demonstrated via simulation studies.