An Application of Vector Time Series Techniques to Macroeconomic Forecasting

A wide variety of time series techniques are now used for generating forecasts of economic variables, with each technique attempting to summarize and exploit whatever regularities exist in a given data set. It appears that many researchers arbitrarily choose one of these techniques. The purpose of this article is to provide an example for which the choice of time series technique appears important; merely choosing arbitrarily among available techniques may lead to suboptimal results.     

Unit-Root Tests and the Statistical Pitfalls of Seasonal Adjustment: The Case of U.S. Postwar Real Gross National Product

An often-used scenario in marketing is that of individuals purchasing in a Poisson manner with their purchasing rates distributed gamma across the population of customers. Ehrenberg (1959) introduced the marketing community to this story and the resulting negative binomial distribution (NBD), and during the past 30 years the NBD model has been shown to work quite well. But the basic gamma/Poisson assumptions lack some face validity. In many product categories, customers purchase more regularly than the exponential. There are some individuals who will never purchase. The purpose of this article is to review briefly the literature that addresses these and other issues. The tractable results presented arise when the basic gamma/Poisson assumptions are relaxed one issue at a time. Some conjectures will be made about the robustness of the NBD when multiple deviations occur together. The NBD may work, but there are still opportunities for working on variations of the NBD theme.     

On Estimation of the Bivariate Poisson INAR Process

In a recent article, Pedeli and Karlis (2010 Pedeli, X. and Karlis, D. 2010. A Bivariate INAR(1) Process with Application. Statistical Modelling: An international Journal, 11: 325–349. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) examined the extension of the classical Integer–valued Autoregressive (INAR) model to the bivariate case. In the present article, we examine estimation methods for the case of bivariate Poisson innovations. This is a simple extension of the classical INAR model allowing for two discrete valued time series to be correlated. Properties of different estimators are given. We also compare their properties via a small simulation experiment. Extensions to incorporate covariate information is discussed. A real data application is also provided.     

Bivariate versus univariate ordinal categorical data with reference to an ophthalmologic study

The Wisconsin Epidemiologic Study of Diabetic Retinopathy is a population-based epidemiological study carried out in Southern Wisconsin during the 1980s. The resulting data were analysed by different statisticians and ophthalmologists during the last two decades. Most of the analyses were carried out on the baseline data, although there were two follow-up studies on the same population. A Bayesian analysis of the first follow-up data, taken four years after the baseline study, was carried out by Angers and Biswas [Angers, J.-F. and Biswas, A., 2004, A Bayesian analysis of the four-year follow-up data of theWisconsin epidemiologic study of diabetic retinopathy. Statistics in Medicine, 23, 601–615.], where the choice of the best model in terms of the covariate inclusion is done, and estimates of the associated covariate effects were obtained using the baseline data to set the prior for the parameters. In the present article we consider an univariate transformation of the bivariate ordinal data, and a parallel analysis with the much simpler univariate data is carried out. The results are then compared with the results of Angers and Biswas (2004). In conclusion, our analyses suggest that the univariate analysis fails to detect features of the data found by the bivariate analysis. Even an univariate transformation of our data with quite high correlation with both left and right eyes is inadequate.     

Tests of independence for censored bivariate failure time data

Bivariate failure time data is widely used in survival analysis, for example, in twins study. This article presents a class of chi2-type tests for independence between pairs of failure times after adjusting for covariates. A bivariate accelerated failure time model is proposed for the joint distribution of bivariate failure times while leaving the dependence structures for related failure times completely unspecified. Theoretical properties of the proposed tests are derived and variance estimates of the test statistics are obtained using a resampling technique. Simulation studies show that the proposed tests are appropriate for practical use. Two examples including the study of infection in catheters for patients on dialysis and the diabetic retinopathy study are also given to illustrate the methodology.     

Estimating the parameters of a BINMA Poisson model for a non-stationary bivariate time series

This article proposes a novel non-stationary BINMA time series model by extending two INMA processes where their innovation series follow the bivariate Poisson under time-varying moment assumptions. This article also demonstrates, through simulation studies, the use and superiority of the generalized quasi-likelihood (GQL) approach to estimate the regression effects, which is computationally less complicated as compared to conditional maximum likelihood estimation (CMLE) and the feasible generalized least squares (FGLS). The serial and bivariate dependence correlations are estimated by a robust method of moments.     

The Dynamic Relationship Between the Dollar and Components of U.S. Trade

The dynamic response of the nominal trade account to changes in the value of the U.S. dollar has been posited to follow a J-curve pattern. Recent experience calls this into question. The aggregate nominal trade balance is decomposed here into four components, both prices and volumes of imports and exports. Time series specification tests and Granger tests of causal priority are employed to identify the existence and nature of the response of each individual component to dollar movements. Surprisingly weak and delayed responses of both import prices and volumes are found, suggesting a new view of trade-balance evolution.     

Seasonal Adjustment of the Weekly Monetary Aggregates: A Model-Based Approach

A procedure is developed for seasonally adjusting weekly time series, based on a composite of regression and time series models. The procedure is applied to some weekly U.S. money supply series currently seasonally adjusted by the Federal Reserve.     

Nonparametric estimation of linear functionals of a bivariate distribution under univariate censoring

In the presence of univariate censoring, a class of nonparametric estimators is proposed for linear functionals of a bivariate distribution of paired failure times. The estimators are shown to be root-n consistent and asymptotically normal. An adjusted empirical log-likelihood ratio statistic is developed and proved to follow a chi-square distribution asymptotically. Two types of confidence intervals, based on the normal approximation method and the empirical likelihood method, respectively, are constructed to make inference about the linear functionals. Their performance is evaluated in several simulation studies and a real example.     

A Comparison of Autoregressive Univariate Forecasting Procedures for Macroeconomic Time Series

The actual performance of several automated univariate autoregressive forecasting procedures, applied to 150 macroeconomic time series, are compared. The procedures are the random walk model as a basis for comparison; long autoregressions, with three alternative rules for lag length selection; and a long autoregression estimated by minimizing the sum of absolute deviations. The sensitivity of each procedure to preliminary transformations, data, periodicity, forecast horizon, loss function employed in parameter estimation, and seasonal adjustment procedures is examined. The more important conclusions are that Akaike's lag-length selection criterion works well in a wide variety of situations, the modeling of long memory components becomes important for forecast horizons of three or more periods, and linear combinations of forecasts do not improve forecast quality appreciably.     

Forecasting with univariate TAR models

The forecasting stage in the analysis of a univariate threshold-autoregressive model, with exogenous threshold variable, has been developed in this paper via the computation of the so-called predictive distributions. The procedure permits one to forecast simultaneously the response and exogenous variables. An important issue in this work is the treatment of eventual missing observations present in the two time series before obtaining forecasts.     

An approximation to the poly-t distribution

This investigation examines an approximation to the poly-t distribution, which often occurs in the Bayesian analysis of a linear model. The approximation allows one to compute the mean vector and dispersion matrix of any k/0 multivariate poly-t distribution in such a way that only univariate and bivariate numerical integrations are required. A numerical study depicts the advantages and disadvantages of the approximation.     

A semiparametric shock model for a pair of event-related dependent censored failure times

In this paper, we propose a semiparametric shock model for two dependent failure times where the risk indicator of one failure time plays the part of a time-varying covariate for the other one. According to Hougaard [2000. Analysis of Multivariate Survival Data. Springer, New York], the dependence between the two failure times is therefore of event-related type.     

When and how much do average forecasts improve predictive accuracy

A composite forecast combines two or more individual forecasts into a single estimate by way of a number of different averaging schemes. The easiest way to combine forecasts is through using a simple average. In this paper, the authors show that in many instances the simple average of individual forecasts approximates the optimal combining scheme. Results are expressed in terms of the probability that a composite forecast will improve upon an individual forecast.     

Bootstrapping the augmented Dickey–Fuller test for unit root using the MDIC

In this paper, we consider the bootstrap procedure for the augmented Dickey–Fuller (ADF) unit root test by implementing the modified divergence information criterion (MDIC, Mantalos et al. [An improved divergence information criterion for the determination of the order of an AR process, Commun. Statist. Comput. Simul. 39(5) (2010a), pp. 865–879; Forecasting ARMA models: A comparative study of information criteria focusing on MDIC, J. Statist. Comput. Simul. 80(1) (2010b), pp. 61–73]) for the selection of the optimum number of lags in the estimated model. The asymptotic distribution of the resulting bootstrap ADF/MDIC test is established and its finite sample performance is investigated through Monte-Carlo simulations. The proposed bootstrap tests are found to have finite sample sizes that are generally much closer to their nominal values, than those tests that rely on other information criteria, like the Akaike information criterion [H. Akaike, Information theory and an extension of the maximum likelihood principle, in Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Information Theory, B.N. Petrov and F. Csáki, eds., Akademiai Kaido, Budapest, 1973, pp. 267–281]. The simulations reveal that the proposed procedure is quite satisfactory even for models with large negative moving average coefficients.