Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

Enforcing Stationarity through the Prior in Vector Autoregressions

Heaps, Sarah E.

Enforcing Stationarity through the Prior in Vector Autoregressions Thumbnail


Authors



Abstract

Stationarity is a very common assumption in time series analysis. A vector autoregressive process is stable if and only if the roots of its characteristic equation lie outside the unit circle, constraining the autoregressive coefficient matrices to lie in the stationary region. However, the stationary region has a highly complex geometry which impedes specification of a prior distribution. In this work, an unconstrained reparameterization of a stationary vector autoregression is presented. The new parameters are partial autocorrelation matrices, which are interpretable, and can be transformed bijectively to the space of unconstrained square matrices through a simple mapping of their singular values. This transformation preserves various structural forms of the partial autocorrelation matrices and readily facilitates specification of a prior. Properties of this prior are described along with an important special case which is exchangeable with respect to the order of the elements in the observation vector. Posterior inference and computation are described and implemented using Hamiltonian Monte Carlo via Stan. The prior and inferential procedures are illustrated with an application to a macroeconomic time series which highlights the benefits of enforcing stationarity and encouraging shrinkage toward a sensible parametric structure. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Citation

Heaps, S. E. (2023). Enforcing Stationarity through the Prior in Vector Autoregressions. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 32(1), 74-83. https://doi.org/10.1080/10618600.2022.2079648

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date May 12, 2022
Online Publication Date Jun 23, 2022
Publication Date 2023
Deposit Date Jul 21, 2022
Publicly Available Date Mar 14, 2023
Journal Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics
Print ISSN 1061-8600
Electronic ISSN 1537-2715
Publisher American Statistical Association
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 32
Issue 1
Pages 74-83
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/10618600.2022.2079648
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1197027

Files

Published Journal Article (1.7 Mb)
PDF

Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.





You might also like



Downloadable Citations