arXiv subjects

Suhasini Subba Rao

Publications and source records attributed to Suhasini Subba Rao.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Conditionally specified graphical modeling of stationary multivariate time series

Graphical models are ubiquitous for summarizing conditional relations in multivariate data. In many applications involving multivariate time series, it is of interest to learn an interaction graph that treats each individual time series as nodes of the graph, with the presence of an edge between two nodes signifying conditional dependence given the others. Typically, the partial covariance is used as a measure of conditional dependence. However, in many applications, the outcomes may not be Gaussian and/or could be a mixture of different outcomes. For such time series using the partial covariance as a measure of conditional dependence may be restrictive. In this article, we propose a broad class of time series models which are specifically designed to succinctly encode process-wide conditional independence in its parameters. For each univariate component in the time series, we model its conditional distribution with a distribution from the exponential family. We develop a notion of process-wide compatibility under which such conditional specifications can be stitched together to form a well-defined strictly stationary multivariate time series. We call this construction a conditionally exponential stationary graphical model (CEStGM). A central quantity underlying CEStGM is a positive kernel which we call the interaction kernel. Spectral properties of such positive kernel operators constitute a core technical foundation of this work. We establish process-wide local and global Markov properties of CEStGM exploiting a Hammersley-Clifford type decomposition of the interaction kernel. Further, we study various probabilistic properties of CEStGM and show that it is geometrically mixing. An approximate Gibbs sampler is also developed to simulate sample paths of CEStGM.

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arXiv2022

Inverse covariance operators of multivariate nonstationary time series

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 matrix decay at a certain rate then the rate (up to a factor) transfers to the rows/columns of the inverse covariance matrix. This is used to obtain a nonstationary autoregressive representation of the time series and a Baxter-type bound between the parameters of the autoregressive infinite representation and the corresponding finite autoregressive projection. The aforementioned results lay the foundation for the subsequent analysis of locally stationary time series. In particular, we show that smoothness properties on the covariance matrix transfer to (i) the inverse covariance (ii) the parameters of the vector autoregressive representation and (iii) the partial covariances. All results are set up in such a way that the constants involved depend only on the eigenvalue of the covariance matrix and can be applied in the high-dimensional settings with non-diverging eigenvalues.

math.ST↗

arXiv2022

Graphical models for nonstationary time series

We propose NonStGM, a general nonparametric graphical modeling framework for studying dynamic associations among the components of a nonstationary multivariate time series. It builds on the framework of Gaussian Graphical Models (GGM) and stationary time series Gaussian Graphical model (StGM), and complements existing works on parametric graphical models based on change point vector autoregressions (VAR). Analogous to StGM, the proposed framework captures conditional noncorrelations (both intertemporal and contemporaneous) in the form of an undirected graph. In addition, to describe the more nuanced nonstationary relationships among the components of the time series, we introduce the new notion of conditional nonstationarity/stationarity and incorporate it within the graph architecture. This allows one to distinguish between direct and indirect nonstationary relationships among system components, and can be used to search for small subnetworks that serve as the "source" of nonstationarity in a large system. Together, the two concepts of conditional noncorrelation and nonstationarity/stationarity provide a parsimonious description of the dependence structure of the time series.

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arXiv2022

Using the left Gram matrix to cluster high dimensional data

For high dimensional data, where P features for N objects (P >> N) are represented in an NxP matrix X, we describe a clustering algorithm based on the normalized left Gram matrix, G = XX'/P. Under certain regularity conditions, the rows in G that correspond to objects in the same cluster converge to the same mean vector. By clustering on the row means, the algorithm does not require preprocessing by dimension reduction or feature selection techniques and does not require specification of tuning or hyperparameter values. Because it is based on the NxN matrix G, it has a lower computational cost than many methods based on clustering the feature matrix X. When compared to 14 other clustering algorithms applied to 32 benchmarked microarray datasets, the proposed algorithm provided the most accurate estimate of the underlying cluster configuration more than twice as often as its closest competitors.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2022

A prediction perspective on the Wiener-Hopf equations for time series

The Wiener-Hopf equations are a Toeplitz system of linear equations that naturally arise in several applications in time series. These include the update and prediction step of the stationary Kalman filter equations and the prediction of bivariate time series. The celebrated Wiener-Hopf technique is usually used for solving these equations and is based on a comparison of coefficients in a Fourier series expansion. However, a statistical interpretation of both the method and solution is opaque. The purpose of this note is to revisit the (discrete) Wiener-Hopf equations and obtain an alternative solution that is more aligned with classical techniques in time series analysis. Specifically, we propose a solution to the Wiener-Hopf equations that combines linear prediction with deconvolution. The Wiener-Hopf solution requires the spectral factorization of the underlying spectral density function. For ease of evaluation it is often assumed that the spectral density is rational. This allows one to obtain a computationally tractable solution. However, this leads to an approximation error when the underlying spectral density is not a rational function. We use the proposed solution with Baxter's inequality to derive an error bound for the rational spectral density approximation.

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arXiv2020

Spectral methods for small sample time series: A complete periodogram approach

The periodogram is a widely used tool to analyze second order stationary time series. An attractive feature of the periodogram is that the expectation of the periodogram is approximately equal to the underlying spectral density of the time series. However, this is only an approximation, and it is well known that the periodogram has a finite sample bias, which can be severe in small samples. In this paper, we show that the bias arises because of the finite boundary of observation in one of the discrete Fourier transforms which is used in the construction of the periodogram. Moreover, we show that by using the best linear predictors of the time series over the boundary of observation we can obtain a "complete periodogram" that is an unbiased estimator of the spectral density. In practice, the "complete periodogram" cannot be evaluated as the best linear predictors are unknown. We propose a method for estimating the best linear predictors and prove that the resulting "estimated complete periodogram" has a smaller bias than the regular periodogram. The estimated complete periodogram and a tapered version of it are used to estimate parameters, which can be represented in terms of the integrated spectral density. We prove that the resulting estimators have a smaller bias than their regular periodogram counterparts. The proposed method is illustrated with simulations and real data.

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arXiv2020

Reconciling the Gaussian and Whittle Likelihood with an application to estimation in the frequency domain

In time series analysis there is an apparent dichotomy between time and frequency domain methods. The aim of this paper is to draw connections between frequency and time domain methods. Our focus will be on reconciling the Gaussian likelihood and the Whittle likelihood. We derive an exact, interpretable, bound between the Gaussian and Whittle likelihood of a second order stationary time series. The derivation is based on obtaining the transformation which is biorthogonal to the discrete Fourier transform of the time series. Such a transformation yields a new decomposition for the inverse of a Toeplitz matrix and enables the representation of the Gaussian likelihood within the frequency domain. We show that the difference between the Gaussian and Whittle likelihood is due to the omission of the best linear predictions outside the domain of observation in the periodogram associated with the Whittle likelihood. Based on this result, we obtain an approximation for the difference between the Gaussian and Whittle likelihoods in terms of the best fitting, finite order autoregressive parameters. These approximations are used to define two new frequency domain quasi-likelihoods criteria. We show that these new criteria can yield a better approximation of the spectral divergence criterion, as compared to both the Gaussian and Whittle likelihoods. In simulations, we show that the proposed estimators have satisfactory finite sample properties.

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arXiv2016

Statistical inference for spatial statistics defined in the Fourier domain

A class of Fourier based statistics for irregular spaced spatial data is introduced, examples include, the Whittle likelihood, a parametric estimator of the covariance function based on the $L_{2}$-contrast function and a simple nonparametric estimator of the spatial autocovariance which is a non-negative function. The Fourier based statistic is a quadratic form of a discrete Fourier-type transform of the spatial data. Evaluation of the statistic is computationally tractable, requiring $O(nb^{})$ operations, where $b$ are the number Fourier frequencies used in the definition of the statistic and $n$ is the sample size. The asymptotic sampling properties of the statistic are derived using both increasing domain and fixed domain spatial asymptotics. These results are used to construct a statistic which is asymptotically pivotal.

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arXiv2016

Orthogonal samples for estimators in time series

Inference for statistics of a stationary time series often involve nuisance parameters and sampling distributions that are difficult to estimate. In this paper, we propose the method of orthogonal samples, which can be used to address some of these issues. For a broad class of statistics, an orthogonal sample is constructed through a slight modification of the original statistic, such that it shares similar distributional properties as the centralised statistic of interest. We use the orthogonal sample to estimate nuisance parameters of weighted average periodogram estimators and $L_{2}$-type spectral statistics. Further, the orthogonal sample is utilized to estimate the finite sampling distribution of various test statistics under the null hypothesis. The proposed method is simple and computationally fast to implement. The viability of the method is illustrated with various simulations.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2012

The quantile spectral density and comparison based tests for nonlinear time series

In this paper we consider tests for nonlinear time series, which are motivated by the notion of serial dependence. The proposed tests are based on comparisons with the quantile spectral density, which can be considered as a quantile version of the usual spectral density function. The quantile spectral density 'measures' sequential dependence structure of a time series, and is well defined under relatively weak mixing conditions. We propose an estimator for the quantile spectral density and derive its asympototic sampling properties. We use the quantile spectral density to construct a goodness of fit test for time series and explain how this test can also be used for comparing the sequential dependence structure of two time series. The method is illustrated with simulations and some real data examples.

math.ST↗

arXiv2011

Mixing properties of ARCH and time-varying ARCH processes

There exist very few results on mixing for non-stationary processes. However, mixing is often required in statistical inference for non-stationary processes such as time-varying ARCH (tvARCH) models. In this paper, bounds for the mixing rates of a stochastic process are derived in terms of the conditional densities of the process. These bounds are used to obtain the $α$, 2-mixing and $β$-mixing rates of the non-stationary time-varying $\operatorname {ARCH}(p)$ process and $\operatorname {ARCH}(\infty)$ process. It is shown that the mixing rate of the time-varying $\operatorname {ARCH}(p)$ process is geometric, whereas the bound on the mixing rate of the $\operatorname {ARCH}(\infty)$ process depends on the rate of decay of the $\operatorname {ARCH}(\infty)$ parameters. We note that the methodology given in this paper is applicable to other processes.

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arXiv2009

A test for second order stationarity of a time series based on the Discrete Fourier Transform (Technical Report)

We consider a zero mean discrete time series, and define its discrete Fourier transform at the canonical frequencies. It is well known that the discrete Fourier transform is asymptotically uncorrelated at the canonical frequencies if and if only the time series is second order stationary. Exploiting this important property, we construct a Portmanteau type test statistic for testing stationarity of the time series. It is shown that under the null of stationarity, the test statistic is approximately a chi square distribution. To examine the power of the test statistic, the asymptotic distribution under the locally stationary alternative is established. It is shown to be a type of noncentral chi-square, where the noncentrality parameter measures the deviation from stationarity. The test is illustrated with simulations, where is it shown to have good power. Some real examples are also included to illustrate the test.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2008

Normalized least-squares estimation in time-varying ARCH models

We investigate the time-varying ARCH (tvARCH) process. It is shown that it can be used to describe the slow decay of the sample autocorrelations of the squared returns often observed in financial time series, which warrants the further study of parameter estimation methods for the model. Since the parameters are changing over time, a successful estimator needs to perform well for small samples. We propose a kernel normalized-least-squares (kernel-NLS) estimator which has a closed form, and thus outperforms the previously proposed kernel quasi-maximum likelihood (kernel-QML) estimator for small samples. The kernel-NLS estimator is simple, works under mild moment assumptions and avoids some of the parameter space restrictions imposed by the kernel-QML estimator. Theoretical evidence shows that the kernel-NLS estimator has the same rate of convergence as the kernel-QML estimator. Due to the kernel-NLS estimator's ease of computation, computationally intensive procedures can be used. A prediction-based cross-validation method is proposed for selecting the bandwidth of the kernel-NLS estimator. Also, we use a residual-based bootstrap scheme to bootstrap the tvARCH process. The bootstrap sample is used to obtain pointwise confidence intervals for the kernel-NLS estimator. It is shown that distributions of the estimator using the bootstrap and the ``true'' tvARCH estimator asymptotically coincide. We illustrate our estimation method on a variety of currency exchange and stock index data for which we obtain both good fits to the data and accurate forecasts.

math.ST↗

arXiv2007

A recursive online algorithm for the estimation of time-varying ARCH parameters

In this paper we propose a recursive online algorithm for estimating the parameters of a time-varying ARCH process. The estimation is done by updating the estimator at time point $t-1$ with observations about the time point $t$ to yield an estimator of the parameter at time point $t$. The sampling properties of this estimator are studied in a non-stationary context -- in particular, asymptotic normality and an expression for the bias due to non-stationarity are established. By running two recursive online algorithms in parallel with different step sizes and taking a linear combination of the estimators, the rate of convergence can be improved for parameter curves from Hölder classes of order between 1 and 2.

math.ST↗

arXiv2007

Nonparametric estimation for dependent data with an application to panel time series

In this paper we consider nonparametric estimation for dependent data, where the observations do not necessarily come from a linear process. We study density estimation and also discuss associated problems in nonparametric regression using the 2-mixing dependence measure. We compare the results under 2-mixing with those derived under the assumption that the process is linear. In the context of panel time series where one observes data from several individuals, it is often too strong to assume the joint linearity of processes. Instead the methods developed in this paper enable us to quantify the dependence through 2-mixing which allows for nonlinearity. We propose an estimator of the panel mean function and obtain its rate of convergence. We show that under certain conditions the rate of convergence can be improved by allowing the number of individuals in the panel to increase with time.

math.ST↗

arXiv2006

Statistical inference for time-varying ARCH processes

In this paper the class of ARCH$(\infty)$ models is generalized to the nonstationary class of ARCH$(\infty)$ models with time-varying coefficients. For fixed time points, a stationary approximation is given leading to the notation ``locally stationary ARCH$(\infty)$ process.'' The asymptotic properties of weighted quasi-likelihood estimators of time-varying ARCH$(p)$ processes ($p<\infty$) are studied, including asymptotic normality. In particular, the extra bias due to nonstationarity of the process is investigated. Moreover, a Taylor expansion of the nonstationary ARCH process in terms of stationary processes is given and it is proved that the time-varying ARCH process can be written as a time-varying Volterra series.

math.ST↗